Just past the burned-out church at the city limit, I take the first right. Fifth house on the left. A Semper Fi flag hangs from our old porch & I wave to the truck pulling into the drive. I grew up here! The owner ushers me inside.
Each summer at Storytown USA, I’d duck through the tunnel of a man-made tree to find Alice in Wonderland, at first just a figurine, tiny as a teacup & then a giant busting through the roof: her screaming head, her roof-sized, paint-chipped arms.
Which hand do I eat from to make it grow? The house is dark with overstuffed sofas & a silent large-screen TV. In the kitchen, I’m shown where the ceiling sagged & the toilet upstairs fell through.
Choose right—an armchair holds the war. My father snaps over a dime. Choose left—I hide creek water jugs & plot to take down this whole awful town.
Out front, the hosta saluting their one-armed weapons & the stump of a maple whose helicopter seeds I once stuck to my nose. I am searching the rings. I am only half listening to an explanation—how a plague came, so the neighbors rooted every tree out.
In the backyard there once was a lookout tower with a pole we slid down as if called to disaster. We scraped our backs & wished for a trampoline. Now I see the heads of bouncing boys, their wild hair licking the sky.
–
Laurie Filipelli is a writer and educator who has authored two books of poems—Elseplace (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013) and the 2019 Writers’ League of Texas Discovery Prize winner, Girl Paper Stone (Black Lawrence Press, 2018)—as well as Mighty Writing’s College Application Essay Guide (Mighty Writing, 2017). She lives in Austin where she coaches, edits, and blogs as Mighty Writing.