Alice Bolstridge
The Gift of Freedom
Five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate . . .
a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself.
—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
To apply for the AROHO Gift of Freedom, pretend
you are worth $50,000. Pretend you didn’t grow up
in the 1940s among barnyard chickens
in a rural Maine village so poor that the richest
were unskilled laborers on the railroad.
Pretend when you were in first grade
in that little school of six grades in one room,
that Social Studies lesson didn’t happen,
the one where the teacher read out your
family’s name first from the list of town poor
printed in the Annual Town Report.
Pretend the shame of your poverty then
doesn’t make you exempt forever
from the American Dream in the history book.
Pretend those big older boys did not grab you
at recess out behind the school house
and clutch at your crotch. Pretend some of them
weren’t your uncles and cousins. Pretend
they never tried to force open your mouth
with their tongues. Pretend you did not like it
when your neighbor’s groom, who looked like a prince,
succeeded. Those boys all grew up to be soldiers.
Pretend that you did have a room of your own
way back then, that you didn’t have to sleep
with a sister six years older who divided the bed
with an imaginary line you could not cross.
Pretend she didn’t yell, “Don’t breathe!
Stop your noisy breathing.” Pretend
you had a whole room and a lock
and sound proofing so you could really retreat
every time your father, waving his crutch
in the air, teetering on his crippled balance
shouted at one of you, “Get the hell out
and don’t ever come back. You ain’t worth
the powder to blow you to hell.” Pretend
you remember him like your mother
described him when he came courting,
“straight and tall and handsome as a prince.”
Pretend you never saw your mother crouching
behind the door with a switch from the lilac bush,
waiting to ambush your brother for “running
away” from the milking and animal feeding
and weeding that needed doing.
He ran away to the army as soon as he could.
One by one, they all went to be soldiers—
neighbors, uncles, cousins, brothers, and Mother
cried about where the money would come
from to buy the next bag of Robin Hood flour.
Pretend it was OK to be poor
because you were—pretend—all honest
and hardworking and loving and loved
just like the Five Little Sisters and Little Women.
Pretend you grew up believing your thoughts
mattered, believing they needed to be said,
believing your voice was strong enough
to be heard in all the noise of rage and despair,
believing someone wanted to hear.
Oh, for a lovely room of your own
instead of the attic you ran to
where you day-dreamed among the dead flies
and bowdlerized Fairy Tales
by the brothers Grimm
and True Romances.
Pretend a room of your own in the blue
and gold colors of a serene and peaceful day.
And pretend the power, someday, to see it
all whole and to write it, somehow, all right.
“In thinking about applying for the Gift of Freedom Award, I asked myself, ‘What makes you think you are worth $50,000 as a writer?’ The poem is my exploration of that question.” —Alice Bolstridge
Alice Bolstridge has more than 100 publications of poems, stories, and essays in magazines and anthologies, including Cimarron Review; Intricate Weave (Iris Editions); Passager; Nimrod. Her chapbook of poems, Chance & Choice, was published in 2017 by Finishing Line Press. Under the pseudonym Moore Bowen, she won the 2013 Kenneth Patchen Award for Experimental Writing for the book Oppression for the Heaven of It, published by JEF Books. Other writing awards include the 1985 Oklahoma State University Short Fiction Award and American Academy of Poets Prize; 1991 Best of Issue Award, Licking River Review; 1995 Passager Poet Award; 2005 & 2011 Maine Writers and Publishers Poetry Awards.
