GANGRENE
Onto my boisterous pathway
Falls the invisible flash
Of the secluded black hole,
Where the night butterfly flies.
Neither the salt waters that cleave the coast,
Nor the stiffened blood through my ancestors that ran
Are suited to sate this luminousvoid,
Whose marble urn is gorged with snowflakes of lust.
Her rains of glass,
Her copper thunders
Severed my fingers,
Shorn off my hair,
Ripped out my teeth.
Left me lame ‘n stripped
Before the decoded mirror
Of the universe provoking.
All these mine tissuestorn
Inadvertently I bestowed upon
The dream of the extinguished star,
That lies underneath the hungry baobab.
**
Istok Ulchar (1996, Skopje) is the author of the poetry collections “Shadows through the Circus Tent” (2014), “Intensive Course in Agony” (2016) and “Hrvoje’s Poems”. His poetry is represented in several collections of works done by young Macedonian and former-Yugoslav authors, such as the “Anthology of the Macedonian Young Avant-garde Poetry”, “Lyrical Dodecameron”, “Rukopisi 36”, “Voices of the New Century” etc. He has took part in several literary readings, including the “Punctuation-less Nights” held as part of the festival “Struga Poetry Evenings” in Struga, N. Macedonia, “Poets for Change” in Strumica, N. Macedonia, as a part of the global poetry event “100 Thousand Poets for Change” (one time as an unofficial part of “D Festival”) and the slam-poetry happening “Night of Open Mics” in Belgrade, Serbia. His poems have been translated in Serbian, Hungarian and English language.