The Marsh by Margaryta Golovchenko

A dozing or waking sun grazing
on the bashful water lilies
before the American lotus a pond over.
Their sense of kinship,

only a difference in the waxy resistance
of the leaves.

Water as invasion,
as a measure of welcome.

My lazy minnow self lives here,
preoccupied only with the way dragonflies dance
in ripples and starts across the water,
their mating games too enamoured with speed
to find split-second joy.

At the very edge
a wooden lookout
over things that do not care for looking back,

the castle from my childhood
if only my tales were as long as a swallow’s,
by which I mean anatomy and the body of sound
are not mutually exclusive.

 

——

Margaryta Golovchenko is an undergrad student at the University of Toronto, studying Art History and Literature & Critical Theory, and is an editor for The Spectatorial. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in places such as Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Luna Luna Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, The Murmur House, In/Words, among others, and is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Miso Mermaid (words(on)pages press, 2016) and Pastries and Other Things History Has Tried to Kill Us With (dancing girl press, 2017). She is a recipient of the Chamberlin-Goodison Prize in Poetry and the Northrop Frye Center Undergraduate Research Fellowship.

 

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