THE PIRATE QUEEN by Maggie May Ethridge

Poem 5 / about freedom

Sally Mann / The Three Graces

The Pirate Queen is a book of poetry I wrote that is 90 percent from my actual childhood and teen years, and 10 from my imagination. Writing from the perspective of my child-self and my teen-self was deeply gratifying, as it put into images and metaphors the exact way things felt to me. It was like taking powerful memories and recreating them so that they had less of a hold on me, and I had more of a hold on them. From my earliest childhood friendship to sisterhood and sex, my early years were all shrouded in deep anxiety and suffering. I survived because my mother fought for me and my sister, because I read, because we had animals, because of my two childhood girlfriends, my sister and my cousin, because of trees and water and the San Diego canyons we lived aside, and because of writing.

about freedom

i climbed the bricken, the brack wall
a crumble step foot, young girl in swarm
makeup, ready for attacks of sweaty boys
smelled up cigarettes and pot, granite
hard-ons rising through their levi's and baggy
camouflages, ready for uprisings and upheavals

leaving most in toilets, round town, the thin
girls know how to throw up in the most peculiar
places. habit, like picking your nose or falling
asleep during calculus. the callus on my
nimble thimbles meant i was a virgin, but oh

barely. blue cornflower eyes deflowered, stilled
from stick petal open toward sun with images of
snow white stacks of drugs, middle-age men at
the high school steps where the smokers hang out,
my parents are two steps into the house and ablaze.