Everyone remembers the girl who gets swept away. Dave Bonta's "Next Door to Dorothy" turns to the one who doesn't. The poem imagines a second Kansas girl, one whose house the cyclone misses, and follows her from childhood into adulthood. Its central idea is that escape stories quietly depend on people who are left behind, and that for them the dream of Oz curdles into something closer to despair.
The first stanza borrows the old tale and darkens it. The father is a "slab-faced drunk," and the mother, "vicious with regret / for this brood she should have / drowned at birth," is pulled toward the Wicked Witch. She is too busy with "spells / & weather-making" to bother with her children. Even the storm becomes a household product. The girl "sleeps through storms," so she is not even offered the dramatic rescue Dorothy gets. Instead she "hides in her bed & petitions / the great and powerful wizard," and the bureaucratic verb "petitions" makes her prayer sound both formal and hopeless. The stanza ends on the blunt, ambiguous phrase "a way out," which could mean escape or something worse.
The second stanza jumps "thirty years on" and shows how little has changed. "Oblivion doesn't / seem any closer" is a chilling understatement, as if she had been waiting patiently for it. She now has two children who "creep / quietly past her bedroom door," which repeats the first stanza's hiding in bed. The cruelty has not been repeated, but the silence has, and the poem lets us feel how a childhood pattern can reappear in a new generation. When a tornado takes the neighbor's roof, the clipped, newsy fragments ("Sirens, / helicopters") give way to her bitter question: "Why couldn't it have been me, / my house." Her envy of someone else's disaster is the poem's saddest moment. She asks it of "the crack / in the ceiling," a small, domestic wound that stands in for a sky she can't reach.
The last stanza widens the poem with a clever pun. "Oz is only three clicks of the mouse / away" recalls Dorothy clicking her heels three times, so the internet becomes the modern road to fantasy. The famous line is also turned inside out: because Oz is "no place like home," it becomes "an inducement / to visit often." Escapism is presented as a habit, one that is easy to keep up. Then the poem's pronoun shifts. "We read her latest / messages" suggests she is now writing from somewhere online, and a whole community of readers, including the speaker, loses its "appetite / for dancing in circles." Her pain interrupts the fun. The brief image "Weeds / sprout between the yellow bricks" shows the fantasy road falling into disrepair.
The speaker then turns the Oz story on himself. Wondering whether to "retrieve that old / heart from its safe-deposit box" borrows the Tin Man's longing but reverses it. This heart hasn't been missing, only locked away for safety. Judging by the imagery, the speaker has protected himself by feeling less, and her messages make that protection seem like a failure. The final image, "the first / serious snowstorm of the year" turning "the world back to black & white," echoes the film's drab Kansas, and the weather that never came for her finally arrives. It brings no rescue, though, only drained color and a shiver. Notice also that the speaker "lie[s] awake," as she "stirs awake" earlier, so his sleeplessness quietly links him to her.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and an easy, speaking rhythm. The long sentences run over line breaks, and the ampersands add a casual, typed-out feel that suits its online setting. That plainness works as a deliberate contrast, since a fairy-tale frame is used to tell an unglamorous, modern truth.
The poem matters because it questions a story we usually take as comforting. It asks what happens to those who wait for a wizard and are never answered, and it suggests that reading about someone else's suffering is not the same as helping. The speaker ends cold, awake, and uncertain, and the poem offers no tidy resolution.