KEEP PLANNING – Rachel Lilim

"an eternity that does not begin at the end of time but is attainable in every moment." -Karlheinz Stockhausen "Don't you dare remember me as an instant message R.I.P." -Eat Babies, The Tender Surrender I Every voice, with its rasps and spillages and wanderings; crisp, dawn-bright sob and rusty, hiccuped laughter; becomes simply speech, even yours. And in recitation it is broken: five thousand mimeographed images of a bird. Hands stained with ink, on all fours, A mulch of beaks and tar-stuck feathers, and the machine running, purring carnivorous; five thousand one; perfect images of night. And in recitation it is broken: How did you greet me first? II Litany There is a certain string of symbols that will let me see your face, and i have forgotten it. Dread magic, it fails me. My lips form a name. Here is how you summon up the dead: III On the three-thousandth-and-fifty-second day, beneath the autumn of buildings, burnt bombed and crackly beneath her fingernails, small flakes of wallpaper, she found the home of her friend. The ceiling here was close, and thin; scampered, pebble-showered. An immense chest-feeling of dread, the weight above her; slow accumulation of time. The home was beneath a thousand others now, not at all where she had left it. The door gave easily. We stepped into the foyer: I, with her, with you. The walls were close and tight and I saw your words scrawled everywhere across them. And you took her by the hand: The centre of the earth, farther away than yesterday, the day before. 3052 is guessing. I do not know that much. Beyond the foyer were rooms spilled overflowing with screams and pleading and that ever-fresh redness of blood: Panic! That is what you said to her, and, Help! And she responded in kind. Adjoining your house was her’s, and it was full sobbing with regret: The digital grave is bordered on all sides, by all graves. each of them is full. a memorial cross unfolding from every edge and point into a bouquet of mossy stone. the soon-dead work ceaselessly at their monuments. Between and through the thin-pressed crumbling walls we whispered to each other, our discontent and cold acid spitting tears. If we were to die it would be together; If I live you will live with me. And above, pitiless, god watches; each saints day a record of our terror and our screaming. IIIa Cremation, impracticability: beneath each tomb were made a thousand tombs, and in each tomb the king, so there could be no mistaking. A thousand hi-shutter stills of flash-paper. IIIb Sky burial: I saw your face on someone else’s name today, and the lines beneath your eyes impressed beneath a strangers. A small piece of everywhere. Small clipped snippets of your smile. Writhing in their teeth. IIIc Embalming: the monument was an exact replica of her house as she had last rushed from it, every and each detail exact. The way the wind troubled the curtains, the precise quality of light. Stockpot on the stove, small stewing bones, extraction of gelatin; half-solved crossword; laundry still-damp and tumbling, that horrible buzz the dryer made. IV Here is the reality: you populate your home with stolen ghosts. IV She found the house of her friend, and it was painted board, and fell softly to the floor. IV Nothing echoes. I do not like this place very much, this piece. I do not think I have any claim—I do not know what death is. Florida parking-lot, magnolia blossoms; flowers that looked like shredded paper. I hated wearing a suit. I did not see my grandmother, the year that she was dying. I did not see my grandfather, the year that he was dying. I found out XXXX was dead, months later, from a stranger. We had exchanged XXXX messages. I told the stranger that we had only known each-other for a short while. I have no right. IV Nothing echoes. the dusk is blood above the mounds of billboards, papier-mâché mountains, grey sludge, ink-bled faces, letters come unstuck and caught in tangles of light-poles, staple-hived and scabrous; armoured; and wreathed about: million-limbed missing, milling- shoe-shush like an avalanche—the air, here, is still and precisely chilled; the sky is a dome of frosted glass— you look up from the poster: too-bright, it is day again, and the horizon still red. V There are crystals to outnumber the stars above, and light to string every angels lyre, and humming obelisks in chambers beneath the earth, and dead stone living. And nothing else. Empty hallways beneath the sea. I do not know where you are buried. I miss you all. *** Rachel Lilim is a collection of Words, Audio files, and Images. You can find her. 01 May 2025