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:

Hard-Shelled Mirrors in One Star Shaped Urge

Apple seeds lay beside each other
in separate beds. Grow in kaleidoscope
carpel crib like a family of pips. Together
in one star-shaped urge they are hard-shelled
mirrors crouched by a fire touching elbows
for warmth against the padded night.
There’s too much in-between a family. Decades pass
before you realize you never left the center.
You’ve been inside this core, the whole
time, as shelled as the others, looking past too
tight fitting chambers, all mute as a glove.
Sometimes suffocating, sometimes a sleepover.
After two days, I return home where I live alone
and you’ve only visited once but I can’t remember why,
that one time, you had to sleep in my bed while I was gone.
You didn’t rest and I knew you’d never return.
Here, at my own kitchen table, I mindlessly drink beer
to recover and hold my hand out like a glove waiting
for my cat’s skull to land. A small rock falling
into an empty cup. After too long without, he digs
for love into the seat of my palm. Rubs his eyes
and nose against my skin hard for comfort. He knows
he’s leaving a small river behind for me.
Cold, clever, damp and set on returning.

They airlifted you from your death bed to another
as weightless as a feather floating from a down pillow
up and back into a sleeping mouth. I followed behind
you and the drive felt like the path of a drying stream.
At the hospital, I couldn’t sleep by your window on that
folded plank of cushion though I tried to hold the space of your dog.
Eventually, the sun decided to rise and it filled up the room
with morning, blinding us like it had crossed the pane
of our windshield by biting into the dark car where we
were stuck, living. Moving forcefully together
on one lonesome trip. I think the human body
spends a life opening doors: the mouth, the eyes,
the hands practice. Before I leave to let you rest alone,
I make sure to cover you in lotion, two socks, another
blanket. I line up drinks and candies across your bedside table.
Sharp as a seed, you tell me you need nothing from me. Still,
I rub your feet, a kindling.
They fit inside my palms the same as your mother’s.

Woman as Hammered Copper Clawfoot Tub

The soap suds curl up to me in this bath like a pond of balmy diamonds.
Left supermarket children stare with scintillating teeth.
The water, a plate of smiling negligible mouths.
Bubble babies, where is your mother?
I ask the glossy moving O-shapes amassed at my thighs.
And where is yours? All of us, transient bodies,
miniscule pulp dissolving in our own anguished
ruddy soup. Religiously, my mother has taken a shower
in the morning and a bath in the night for forty-four years
to fend against 12-hour nursing shifts.
Nurse is another word for womb
and womb, just another bath.
Somewhere around 11,000 times she's set out
on this baptism of draining herself. Aiming to
float away in a light wispy way, like all women attempt
eventually. From my own hammered tub, I ask Siri
to define our contradictions, this womanhood.
The robots who run humanity are unsure of their vocabulary
for woman. They sink into the next best synonym.
We know we ladies are levee.
As good as overflow drains can get.
All safety features and hammered copper
just below the rim of life’s mean edge, channeling excess
away into our abysmal drain while the world sleeps
warmly in its cosseted bath of man made empire.
Woman to woman, Siri, what are we but ephemeral fictiles?
Is every working woman’s life defined by its fugaciousness?
I’m medium-well meat in quaggy wrinkle skin
by the time she gathers her reply.
Did you mean Nugatory? Defined: nu·ga·to·ry, adjective
1. Of no value or importance, 2. Useless or futile
Example: All your excuses for why you didn't turn
the bath tap off when you left the apartment
are nugatory; doesn’t change the fact that the tub overflowed
and trickled down into the apartments below.
I can’t find my diamond children anywhere.
They’ve dissolved into their own miry nullity now.
I wet my hair before it’s too cold for me to stand it.