The Coat

Luce

That coat carries the story I no longer tell,

I wear it faithfully. Pockets heavy with a ticket

to a station that no longer exists.

Every stitch measures the drift of time,

seams salted by the Adriatic gale.

Inside, the scent of olden days lingers,

where voices echo with lullabies

and secrets escape through cracked buttons,

coarse as mountain scree;

within are those who will never be erased—

their traces mark my paths.

Every struggle, sudden warmth, every gentle drop:

absorbed into the dark cut of my coat.

The moment I shed it, I vanish from time—

long ago, I hung it on the rack of karst slumber.

Luka Popovic, writing under the pen name Luce, is a poet and artist from Montenegro born in
2006. He is a student at the Faculty of Montenegrin Language and Literature. His work is
primarily rooted in surrealist and expressionist traditions. One of his works is forthcoming in
issue #25 of Spectral Realms.