Gita Ralleigh

domestic fantasy

Dust persists in unloved corners, dust wishes to rise free of this
swished rag & ride the breeze. I am gathering up dead skin cells,
pollen grains, animal dander, when the slant of sunlight reminds
me that energy and matter are equivalent. Dust transfigures into
dervish cloud, fragmented glitter. Dust speaks in tongues: fugitive
wheeling desert sands, meteorite’s charred flecks, songs of a universe
traversed in dreams. Don’t matter and mother share the same origin?

women, dreaming

A philosopher claimed that seeing ourselves in dreams proved
the existence of a human soul. How else to account for such
visionary doubling? The ability to watch a dream self, unmoved
by our inexplicable avatar. Perhaps he didn’t know the daily life
of women. How we leave waking bodies like shadows, tethered
by our heels to workday grind, commuter’s grope, baby’s suckle.
Once, I travelled so far from myself, I became demoness, dakini,
spitting up shredded flesh, splintered bone. Nightlong I stared at
ceilings, took wing as aisling or banshee, ascended to spindle the
greenish skies, shrieked in mythic airs. Who was she down there,
who smiled and nodded, jerking her skinned puppet-limbs?

Gita Ralleigh is a poet, writer and doctor born to Indian immigrant parents in London. Her poetry books are A Terrible Thing (Bad Betty Press, 2020) and Siren (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). She is a trustee of literary charity, Spread The Word. You can find her on Twitter as @storyvilled and on Instagram as @gita_ralleigh

Gita wrote the following about her poems:

Both ‘Domestic Fantasy’ and ‘Women Dreaming’ came from my focus on what was once known as 'women's work' — the dailiness of caring, cleaning, feeding — both its constant, unending nature and the way it leaves the mind untethered,  levitating above the body. Wonderful poems about dust have been written by poets such as Danusha Lameris, Dorianne Laux and Marilyn Nelson and somewhere between reading these luminaries and rereading Silvia Federici's 'Wages Against Housework',  my own tentative poems emerged.