When I wrote "Alice Was Never a Girl," I had no map, only the feeling of a name that didn’t fit, and the silence that comes after the world stops calling you by it. I did not want to write another poem about Wonderland. I wanted to write about the space between names, the space where truth flickers like smoke: unfixed, sacred, and unseen by most.
To my great surprise and with deep gratitude, this poem was awarded *second place* in the “Alice Through The Wormhole” contest hosted by PoetrySoup. I thank the organizers warmly, not only for the recognition, but for creating a space where poems like this can breathe. It is no small gift to be invited into a literary world where transformation, ambiguity, and tenderness are welcomed.
A Name Made of Smoke
"They called her Alice, / but perhaps her true name was Smoke..." The poem begins with a contradiction: a given name and an earned one. I wanted the reader to feel what it is like to walk through the world carrying a familiar mask, while your real name dissolves behind your breath. Smoke became the poem’s metaphor for identity that cannot be contained, something seen but never seized.
This Alice is not the innocent explorer we’ve met before. She is not a girl, and this is not a child's dream. This is an adult reckoning: with memory, with gender, with myth. It is transformation etched in scars and whispered through ruins.
Choosing the Void
"She did not fall. / She transcended." These lines are a quiet rebellion against stories where transformation is treated as failure or madness. My Alice chooses to step through the mirror: not for adventure, but to find the self waiting behind it. That journey is never clean. It requires letting go of comfort and rewriting the limits of one's body and history.
There is something sacred in the act of self-reclamation. It is not loud. It’s not always seen. But it endures, like breath chosen when it’s easier not to breathe.
The Boy She Once Was
The poem’s most intimate moment is when Alice meets “the boy she once was.” For me, this is the poem’s true wormhole: not a passage through space, but time folded inward. Memory becomes sanctuary. There is no shame in that past self, not even sadness. There is only the ache of understanding, of integrating every version of the self into something whole. That is the real magic: not vanishing, but remaining.
Silence as Arrival
The ending gives us no door, no queen, no rabbit. Only a heartbeat: ancient, rain-like, persistent. That, to me, is what remains after the world’s trials and unnamings. When language fails, the body’s rhythm speaks. That is survival. That is grace.
"Only her own heartbeat:
steady, eternal..."
With Gratitude
This poem was written as part of PoetrySoup’s Alice Through The Wormhole contest. To have it recognized with *second place* is an honor I hold with humility and thanks. I am grateful to the contest organizers and judges for seeing in it not just a personal myth, but a shared truth.
In the end, poetry is the way we remind the world that we were here: not always as expected, not always with names intact, but always, somehow, still breathing.