Alice Freezing to Death in Winter Wonderland

Everything was orange and pink
Alice's hair, the colour of the streetlights
at the thickest midnight
of the storm,
snow falling at Cheshire angles,
caterpillars coiling in her hands.

On the drunk trudge home alone she
rattled off the names of bones
from a memory bank
strangely unaffected by the cold,
or liquor,
though her fingers were as numb as rubber.

Her own cheeks felt to her
like slabs of refrigerated pork,
and her defective eyes doubled everything
around her that dizzily fled from stillness,
and her toes became white and frigid
stones of snow.

It was blue, in a field she did not recognize, 
she wandered into it
as if it was her bed.
The gold tall grass stalks faintly swayed,
cast in blue by the 
distant light of the empty road.

And the looking-glass this
she fell through, closing her eyes, 
was only distantly-registered,
a sonic sparkle,
the twinkling sound of the grains of a blizzard
settling quietly, with finality, around her.

© Sean McDonell