Margaryta Golovchenko is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, and serves as editor for The Spectatorial. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Contemporary Verse 2, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Figroot Press, The Murmur House, Luna Luna Magazine, In/Words, and others. She isthe author of the poetry chapbook Miso Mermaid ( words(on)pages press, fall 2016), and is a Fellow at the Northrop Frye Center at Victoria College for the 2017-18 academic year. When not maneuvering around her mountains of to-be-read books, she can be found sharing her (mis)adventures on Twitter @Margaryta505.

Honeybee Tears

Leaving the comfort of the station platform
I realized the lack of a transfer to prove my wanderings

and when asked for said proof by the driver
asked what he’d like me to cough up instead,

the clumps of dried moss I carried for bandages
or the caramel glass with the sun’s fading light,

the disarray of clipped wings from between subway seats
or perhaps the soft sigh with which crickets mate;

we settled on a tiny jar of a substance I refused to name
saying only that it came from the gland of a honeybee heart.

For that I was taken no more than three blocks
and left with a bitter taste only mud can wash out.