Ritual for 2022 by Nisha Ramayya

Effluviate your situatedness in the world, experiencing touch as skim and plummet; you can be affectable and ever murmuring.

Leaving is a feathered performance.

Make a procession of your many flights. Every layer of the forest starbursts as you learn, retrieving stage directions from tree hollows, depositing ears.

Your emanations cross like the letter X, marking the sentience of each node. Get to know all the yous in yourself, lunarise, even a little.

Entrap sense of self as chainmail, the dispersal of difference and preservation of heat.

The blues go close in, in close – open out, out open.

Your narratives may be generated by decay, one becomes from the bottom or undoes from the top. Pythogenesis is rhythm not equilibrium.

Sigmoid hungers, prising apart smiles to reveal the collective demands. To stand in the sign of “girl”.

Globule the page to dissolve the images that should remain; zeros count for much more than you might realise.

Fluorescent vibes raise the field.

Take up space like a balloon bouquet, creating room around your gestures: here is the fullest way out of nothingness.

 

Nisha Ramayya grew up in Glasgow and now lives in London. Her poetry collection States of the Body Produced by Love (2019) is published by Ignota Books. Recent poems and essays can be found online in CCA Annex, JUF, and Spam Zine; and in print in Wasafiri and Magma. She teaches Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London.

This ritual was originally published in the Ignota Diary 2022.