“Drink Me” by Sanjana Ramanathan
Updated: Aug 1
This maudlin garden grows tired
of spitting me out onto the croquet ground
again. I’ve grown used to gripping flamingo
feet, I’ve stopped fighting against my poker
face, I’ve started wearing white gloves
to bed.
The pocket clock says I’m late
for a date I can’t quite remember.
I can’t quite remember—
where I kept that cake,
the one that will stretch me out into
constellations so I don’t feel like a dustspeck
in the wind falling right through the earth
again.
What a curious feeling—
Poison used to taste better from a teacup.
But that shrinking feeling inside of me,
the one that makes me feel like
an echo of myself,
the one that makes me think I must be
shutting up like a kaleidoscope,
sings with its caterpillar voice inside my head.
I must be spiralling down that rabbit hole once more.
Where else do my thoughts chase each other’s tails
like this?
Sanjana Ramanathan is an English student at Drexel University. She enjoys playing video games, cracking open a new book, and daydreaming. Her work has been published or is upcoming in The Front Porch Review, The Confessionalist Zine, and The 33rd, among others. You can find her on Twitter @sanjubilees.