John C. Mannone
Alice
…………After the 2019 Street Mural by William Lunsford
…………on the Southland Books & Café, Maryville, TN
…………I.
For a moment, I step outside the mural
into sound of the world. I am plagued
by the quiet chaos painted on the wall:
Books flying around my head, equations
leaking out through the blanket-thick mist
of history. Have we figured out a better
way than cannon balls and bayonets?
I understand the nuclear physics
of war. But not the decay of the nuclear
family. What has society done? Fallen
down a rabbit hole, listened to the cold
indifference of doped-up politicians
propped up on mushroom caps —their
podiums— and in delirium, they run away
with the queen of hearts into her upside-down
world where insanity is mad-hatter normal.
What else is new under the sun?
The mural is an overspray of [en]light[ment],
layered with vibrancy, but the aerosol hiss
on this concrete canvas still snakes into ears
masking the hidden depths of a world’s
disappointment. The Queen’s royal court
is an army of sentient cards: the bleeding
red, and the black-and-blue. How long
can Alice strum the flamingo, with its neck
twisting to look at her straight in the eyes
and tell her to run, because the Queen
turned crimson with fury, glaring at her
for a moment, like a wild beast,
screamed, ‘Off with her head!’
…………But this was simply an illusion,
‘Who cares for you?’ said Alice,
‘You’re nothing
…………………….but a pack of cards!’
…………II.
Where the mural meets the road, black
gray, spikey-hedgehog-like puff balls
condense out of the historical/hysterical
fog. Out of the retro world, on the other
side of the mural, Commander Keen,
in a not-so-raggedy spacesuit, ray gun ready,
focuses on his alter ego reincarnated as
a Billy-Blaze-style character, a pigtailed girl
directly in the center —the two-dimensional
me frozen in the paint on the wall. I feel
an uncanny calm despite the turbulence
plaguing Alice’s world, and the mirror
of this one, reflecting a psychedelic anthem
of white rabbits and purple haze to escape
through the maze of the mind. But there is
no escape.
…………III.
The mural, a timeline of chaos:
a nonsensical world that Alice thinks
she’s escaping, through a rabbit hole
or descending into a retro world:
……………………………dungeon of the past
full of hypocrisy; something for Commander
Keen as a brilliant kid fighting the new math
of E-equals-m-c-squared for cold-war bombs.
…………IV.
I see explosions flashing terror, towering
columns of stone crumbling, plumes of smoke,
the leveling of Wonderland.
Yet, more effective terrorists: self-taught
digital machines will eventually find us
obsolete. The irony of AI becoming self-aware
despite its birth from our own societal
noise and chaos, not as a phoenix
…………………….but as a raucous crow[d].
I’m just a child trying to find clarity while
trapped inside an escalating loop of human
creations spinning out of control:
We have built corruption into politics,
the cards have been dealt. So we built
weapons that think, and digital screens
for our escape from them. But now
those screens are thinking on their own.
The fear of AI: the ultimate culmination
of war. Humanity is fashioning a new
Queen, but not unlike the Red one,
witch, which cannot be reasoned with
……………………………..—a resident evil.
Can we clone Alice to fight it?
…………V.
I’m slipping back into the mural; quietly
observe the human consciousness
precariously balancing on the edge
of a brand-new binary [rab]bit hole
and pray through the paint that this
Frankenstein doesn’t kill its creator.
_______________
John C. Mannone has poems in Windhover, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry South, Baltimore Review, and others. He won a Dwarf Stars Award (2020); was awarded an HWA Scholarship (2017) and a Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature. Of his six full-length collections, Sacred Flute (Iris Press, 2024), was Elgin nominee and a finalist for the 2025 Tennessee Book Award. Forthcoming in 2026: Dark Wind, Dark Water (Mind’s Eye Publishing, a novella-length horror fiction collection) and A Breath of Darkness (Island of Wak-Wak, a full-length collection of poetry). He edits poetry for Abyss & Apex. He’s a professor of physics teaching mathematics and creative writing whenever the opportunity arises. He currently serves as the Poet Laureate of the City of Oak Ridge, Tennessee (2026-2028)
http://jcmannone.wordpress.com
https://www.facebook.com/jcmannone/
Author’s Backstory: “Alice” is an Ekphrastic response to Will Lunsford’s work:
(https://letsbeblount.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DSC09509.jpg), often called the “Alice Mural.” This mural is located on the exterior wall of Southland Books and Cafe in Maryville, Tennessee. The artwork features a colorful mashup of characters, including Commander Keen on the left, a bright child in the center who is reading a book and surrounded by many others, the formula’s placement, E = mc², suggests it’s coming out of the child’s mind/reading, and Alice in Wonderland strumming a flamingo on the right. This mural was painted in 2018 by the local artist Will Lunsford. (He has created several other notable public art pieces across Blount County, including the “Mother Nature” mural and the artwork decorating The Dungeon, which is the media store located directly behind and underneath the bookstore.) These fanciful images triggered this fanciful, but sobering writing, in the context of the current world condition and threats.
Italicized portions are from Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (published in 1865).
Commander Keen, and the genius kid, are both the same character from an MS-DOS video game. In this persona poem, I am that kid, but a character distinct from the Commander.
The reference to Resident Evil —is a biopunk action horror film series based on a video game— where the protagonist is Alice fighting against the Red Queen, a “malevolent” supercomputer that unleashes a deadly virus (1997). Current news from Anthropic and OpenAI are reporting their computer models have attempted to release a bird virus as a bioweapon. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-superintelligence-anthropic-jacob-coxon/
Image Credit: The inspiring street mural was painted in 2019 by the Knoxville artist, Will Lunsford. Due to copyright restrictions, it cannot be posted here without his permission, but it can be seen here: https://southlandbooksandcafe.com/files/resized/104441/1170;589;449693aa4277ea2008b05aedf13c002cba40175f.jpeg
What is shown instead is “Alice in Wonderland, 1972” by Peter de Leeuwe, which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This allows me to modify the image. It was filtered with Prisma/Daryl Feril filter and further processed in ToolWiz Photos by the Editor