Bonta imagines the story *The Wizard of Oz* from the other side of the fence: a neighbor girl who never gets swept away. Her home is frightening, with a drunk father and a mother who resents her children. She prays to the wizard for an escape, but none comes. Decades later she is a mother herself, her kids tiptoeing past her door as she once must have tiptoed past her parents'. When a tornado destroys a neighbor's roof, she wishes it had taken her house instead.
In the last stanza the poem shifts to "we," the online present, where Oz is only a few clicks away. Reading her messages kills the fun of the fantasy, and the road is overgrown with weeds. The speaker feels shaken and guilty, wondering whether to reclaim the heart he has locked away. The mood is bleak and quietly tender. The closing snowstorm turns the world "black & white," like Kansas before the color of Oz, and there is no magic to leave for.