Did you ever watch your childhood friend transform into a neo-Nazi right before your eyes? The speaker in Matthew Dickman’s Wonderland has, and he details that transformation in a striking series of poems of the same title. (By the way, in poetry school the “speaker” just means the “narrator.”)
The Wonderland poems follow a boy named Caleb, who we first meet in his front yard, hitting a stick against a tree trunk. While he’s outside with his imaginary sword, Dad’s inside the house, hitting Mom in the face. Caleb walks into the “weird dark” of her bedroom to comfort her, clearly powerless against his father’s rage. In the next poem, Caleb’s anger takes on its particularly strange and cruel character when he encounters a dog behind a fence. He starts spitting on it, “some of the phlegm / getting into the dog’s eyes, / its long ears.”
Caleb is not yet in seventh grade when he starts beating up people randomly, but he’s old enough to want beer by the time he gets a stick-and-poke tattoo of a swastika on his arm. Dickman records the moment Caleb’s anger finds its purest expression in Nazism–and the speaker’s own fucked-up, flawed, but completely human reaction to that moment–in this remarkable scene: “When he asked how it looked / I said it looked // good. I couldn’t stop / looking at it // but when I looked up at him / it was like his face wasn’t there.”
