You can use square brackets to create an anonymous array. Then you can use @{ } to de-reference the array:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $kind = 'alph';
my $prop = 'single';

my $slice = {
    kind    => $kind,
    prop    => $prop,
    item    => [5..11]
};

my @item_2 = @{$slice -> {item}};
my $num = scalar @item_2;
map {print "num is $num the $_\n";} @item_2;
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prints:

num is 7 the 5
num is 7 the 6
num is 7 the 7
num is 7 the 8
num is 7 the 9
num is 7 the 10
num is 7 the 11
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Is this what you are after?