Samantha Renee Ratcliffe

Samantha Renee Ratcliffe is an educator, editor, poet, and community organizer devoted to expanding free and accessible writing opportunities throughout Kentucky. She is the founder of Hill Writers Collective, a reading series and writing collective dedicated to uplifting southern voices.  Her work appears in Yearling, Pegasus, White Wall Review, Untelling, Discarded, as well as a forthcoming publication from the University Press of Kentucky. She's honored to be an Oak Ledge Residency recipient, and a two-time graduate winner of the King Library Press Broadside Contest. You can find her on instagram @SamanthaRatcliffePoetry or visit her website SamanthaRatcliffe.com

Easy read of the poems in the images above:

Preserver

Late at night, on your walk to the car from the gym.
I can only watch your eyes, listen for the door to lock.
I can only track your location and hope you say help
if you hang up.

Outside the Pilot bathroom waiting between two open caves:
Fe-male and male, Wo-mens, and mens, middle ground-less. I
can listen for morse code, but only stand outside
the front door-eyes of men. I search the faces
of every passer. Ask the line of loaded guns exiting
the breezeway, Are you angry? Did you see my beating heart
in the stall beside you? He’s been gone too long.
They don’t understand my panic, they,
themselves have always left a room
on purpose.

Let me count all the ways I haven’t, every time
your parents dead named you, absent mindedly
at a steakhouse in the hills. Every time you grace
a drag stage or hike the university path to your office
I can’t save you from this life of biting
back cuticles until your skin breaks.
I can’t save you from your phone or
any masked man.

On the weekends, I look up new countries
we’re too poor to be saved by.
We don’t sleep well before two gunshots.
You reach for me. And I can’t save us from the edge of the dark.
When you say I can't control what the state wants to do to me.

I can’t think of anything worth saying.

Pippin Moon

You are full of wild chambers and cut
purposefully across like an apple
so that the world might better see the star
glowing at your core.
White light rind and perfect seed sleep
in the pith nest of a full heart.
I measure the small sameness of everything
wonder if you’re kin to the moon.
Even apple seeds are just tiny pockets of sugar and cyanide
begging to be crushed in someone else’s mouth.
There is no love on earth that isn’t poison in high doses.
Anything can grow if you let it rest. But I can’t sleep
warm-taped against your chest. I see insomnia
as a question of how to rest beside the moon.

For you, I am night mesocarp. Layers of love lying
between the world and your soft spots. So tart
and cut across the middle on purpose.
All your seeds grow in the shape of tears.
I hear you buzzing resilience in your rest. You remind me
of a rainstorm that announces itself. You say, Here I am,
I cannot fear for I am always running
down the glass of this moving earth. Circling the wound
of the world. Without agency, one might look up
at the moon and say, that’s it? With false teeth,
one might never bite love’s core. Most choose to stay dry
inside their cars and wonder why you move like you do.
Why you had to cut deep into yourself to breathe.
Whole sculptures are carved into being and no one sees those cuts.
Most people don’t deserve to look up.

I can’t change anything about a world spoiled to its core.
But I can promise your sleeping body the fresh love
you are to me, that I will always hold you in the cup
of my hands, keep you in the cup of my mouth
and drink, and drink,
and drink.