“Hope, no matter how unlikely, is still worth singing for. There has to be magic in that.” (Maggie Warren on Presto)
Maggie Warren is a contributor to Half Mystic Journal’s Opus II, Issue I: Presto. They currently teach first-year writing at the University of Missouri Kansas City. She has had work published by Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tanka Journal, Empty Mirror, and Barrelhouse. You can find more of their work at maggiewarren.com.
When I think of presto, I think of the classic image of a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. Sometimes I feel like a magician-poet pulling a toad out of a hat, especially when I get to tell people that there’s really a frog called the pobblebonk, and it sounds like a banjo. But I wonder about other magic tricks. To me, presto is about discovery, but I see my writing as completely reliant on patience and process, which makes me wonder about the power a poet has to exact magic in and out of the poem.
When I was writing “The Toads Have Convinced Me,” my poem in Half Mystic Journal’s presto issue, I was struggling with how to use the anger I’ve been carrying since 2020, when the importance of disability justice became fully apparent to me and my loved ones. Lately that anger has translated to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, as I think about its particular and severe impact on the disabled population, and the importance of centering disability justice in response to acts of harm. I even worried that the world didn’t need a poem right now about hope in response to hardship. But I do believe, fiercely, in the power of joy as liberation: an act of defiance and revolt against injustice.
Burrowing, desert frogs only experience substantial rainstorms four times in their 15-20 year life spans, but they wait patiently for rain—the best days of their lives. The pumpkin toadlet has shriveled eardrums, and its bones glow under ultraviolet light. Scientists theorize that this may be an alternative way the toads locate mates. A bathtub set up as a toad pond in a garden can attract pobblebonk frogs to live, and a person could cultivate a frog community. For me, these realities of nature reveal a sense of presto: an inherent poetry to this life, a chance to find meaning and magic in a world we share with such strange creatures.
I struggled to write “The Toads Have Convinced Me” for four years. I began the poem in the summer of 2020, fully locked down to protect my at-risk family members during the COVID pandemic. By the time I wrote the last words, I’d lost my dad, my aunt and uncle, and many family pets, including my heart-dog.
Looking back, I needed those four years to cultivate a presto moment, and I had to be patient with both my creative and emotional processes as part of the work. There were three defining moments in the journey toward finishing the poem: creating the title (which arrived years into the process), thinking about the concept of “alchemy” as a mechanism for self-growth (the first line reads: “The toads have convinced me to learn alchemy”), and discovering the significance of the Sonoran Desert toad. Those ideas helped me find connections before, between, beside my personal losses and the surprising worlds of toads.
“The Toads Have Convinced Me” moves from a deep questioning of purpose to an admiration of toads singing in the rain. On some level, that evolution is attempt to reach toward joy and gratitude, as the toads do with ease, but in my case, its discovery took time, research, and patience—with myself and with the work, even as every draft over the years felt newly wrong.
Although it took seven versions of this poem to arrive, finally, at the image of the toads’ rain-kissed skin, I didn’t learn until even later how uncommon and valuable a rainstorm is to desert toads. This was the moment: presto—I finally understood that the toads were singing for their love of the sound, their faith in a gift bordering on impossible to catch. Hope, no matter how unlikely, is still worth singing for. There has to be magic in that.
My toads act as a reminder to trust the process, to keep protecting the people I love and those I will never know—that even amid so much loss, it will always be worth telling the stories of my warm childhood summers in rural Missouri, my dad and I picking blackberries, “rainkissed and bruised / skin is enough to sing.”
As of this writing, 36,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed and 81,000 have been wounded by the Israeli army since October 7, 2023. The death rate of the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank is higher than any other major 21st century conflict. Learn more and donate to relief funds on the ground.
Maggie Warren’s “The Toads Have Convinced Me” is featured alongside twenty other pieces in Half Mystic Journal’s Opus II, Issue I: Presto, a constellation of contemporary art, lyrics, poetry, and prose dedicated to the celebration of music in all its forms. The presto issue sings of man-made magick, blurred vision, glitter in the shadows, an aria half-lucid and bewitched by the myth of movement. The music is real, the body electric and imaginary. Issue XI lives on the currency of old dreams and new speed, and right at the moment when you think you’ve learned its dance, it dares you to circle back and look again. It is out now.