KEEP PLANNING time / space / about #049 Alec Ivan the space from within you rots from the outside like some freak of nature—

you’ll be gone soon, adrift in the aftermath of tidal swum, seafoam basked a mild green; there’ll be an occasional sense that you and all of your parts will be gone in the spacious luxury connecting us to a fervor of fevered life, medicine plants cast in tea when extracted and the chemicals used for mating. the formation of brimstone-against-metal. you always liked metal, the way it smells, the offering of olfactory bang oscillating through the pitch tar striding along the greatest river you’ve ever seen. you dunk your head into it at the edge of the blackstone’d beach. the river flows from where your home once was to where your home is now, which is nowhere, nowhere to be found. at least not today. at least yesterday you took your stimulants and thrashed about, grieving a loss none of us could possibly imagine; the kind of loss you feel when there’s nowhere left to hide, when even the steel comes crumbling down upon the showered bodies, the soaked victims, the sordid, passing— gasses ghosthover along the surface of the pavement. nobody said this would be easy, and nobody said this would be hard. nobody ever mentioned the fashioning of cyanide bombs sunken shallow into the disturbed soil, where the worms wrap themselves against each other and follow you toward where you thought you had already gone before everything came null. at the end of it all (and yes, there’s still an end to it all), at the end of it all there’s no way someone could look at this rubble and think, what a miraculous event wrought upon us by Christ our Lord and Savior. but a lot of people do, the ones who are left begging on the streets of blown-out concrete— skyscrapers have toppled, have been slewed into an always-dream tremor relying solely on the hope that someday we will all remember what it was like to be young and unafraid of heights. now we’re afraid of heights. now we’re afraid of everything, and you’ll be gone soon, your interior cracked and bleeding, your heart beating slower, slower, and we cross the threshold of where your mother used to be. used to be blessed with the luck of you. used to be a neighbor. now she’s merely an insect. we see her buzzing around the window, and there’s nothing we can do. I grab a flyswatter. I haul it up toward the bleak overcast of rainclouds and storms that never cease and I bring it down upon your mother-as-fly. her guts spill over onto the window, staining the glass with a partition between life and death until she stops seizing and lays low, quiets herself, and then the barrier is taken down and it’s just death now. you don’t even cry because you’ve dreamed of this moment every night since you got sick. the rubble of the city. the consecrated absence of it all. the way you walk, and the way you can’t find the words to describe what happens when the entire world decides there’s nothing more holy than a trembling mosque brought to its knees, or a cathedral’s spire spine bent below the ashes of of another cathedral and another and another all spliced in two pieces, begging for a merciful extermination, and they will live forever. then there are those who are still underneath it all, and their whispers can be heard for miles and miles; you hear them when you don’t sleep, when you don’t eat, when you fail to recognize yourself in the mirror because all the mirrors are broken. they all get sick eventually. they’re all going to die and they’re all going to be plucked clean with descending vultures or drunken streetcats and what remains will be bones and the bones will float off into the atmosphere once they are crippled into dust. this will happen fifteen billion times, and it will happen to you soon enough. you hack up what we can only assume is blood though it is thicker than blood, though it is near-solid, though the thing once living inside of you is expelling its greatest secrets, though the secrets are void, though the secrets aren’t here for you to say whether it was all worth it or not. everything has passed, or will pass, and is passing now as you vomit hazy green bile onto your bare feet. you crash into yourself, and why do you keep walking, are you searching for something that will help you? are you supposed to be the one to find out what happens if the racket of the sickened bodies we step over is silenced by you and you alone? you are not the protagonist, not even of your own story. look at your skin, the way it sloughs off, how it reveals what you’ve never been able to say to anybody, much less yourself. within a few minutes it will all be gone, your skin, and you’ll look just like everyone else. except you’ll keep your eyes. and your eyes will never leave. let’s make this our last kiss, okay? before your lips melt from your jaw, and your teeth crackle, and the gums loosen and melt. come here. listen to the birds cast song into the coming nightfall. let’s make this worth it. let’s let them know it’s okay to let go, that it’s okay to allow yourself to live when everybody else is dying. was it all worth it? do you feel good? is that the howl of a jet, or are you just singing for one last time.

***_____  Alec Ivan is a midwestern writer responsible for the publication of PHOTOGRAPHS OF MADNESS (Back Patio Press, 2019) and THE TENDER ATROCITIES (Sweat-Drenched Press, 2020). His work has been featured in Expat Press, don’t submit!, Always Crashing, Burning House, Occulum, and others. He lives in Indiana with his wife and two cats. 27 May 2026