it’s thursday and we’re drunk, ditching my grandmother’s funeral
Sreeja Naskar

the dock rocks beneath me, a loose tooth in the dark water.

you lean over me, your breath thick with gin, saying my name

in your slurred voice, something left out in the sun too long.

i tell you a sad story, or maybe i don’t. i just watch your mouth

move, the way your hands trace circles against the wood, restless.

maybe i make it up. a strawberry lie, plucked clean, tart and perfect.

somewhere, my mother is stacking plates in a quiet kitchen.

somewhere, a priest is lowering his voice over too-sweet wine.

somewhere, my grandmother is

or isn’t.

the air hums with cicadas, the sky sways, the long pull of summer.

or maybe that’s just me. again.

you’re still talking: time moving in circles, a star-shaped silence.

the robin blue dress my grandma wore on my seventeenth

birthday. Another strawberry lie rolls my tongue.

I tell you i’ll miss her.

you tell me i already do.

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Sreeja Naskar’s Comments

I wrote this from that weird, in-between space where grief doesn’t even look like grief yet. It’s about disconnection, memory, and the strange ways we try to feel something, or avoid feeling it. I’ve always had this habit of imagining loved ones dying, not because I want to, but maybe as a way to mentally prepare? Which sounds dark, but also real. Like, my grandmother is (or isn’t)—that moment in the poem is exactly how it feels sometimes. You’re supposed to be in mourning, but you’re also drunk at a dock with someone whose hands you’ve memorized. And somehow those things coexist. The “strawberry lie” line came to me out of nowhere, and I liked how it made sadness sound almost sweet, or like something you’d want to taste just once. This poem leans into that, how loss can feel both distant and too close. And how sometimes we grieve sideways.

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