i feel you under my skin
running through my veins
competing with my blood
to see which's going
to reach my heart
faster

Her fears couldn't catch up to
the warm cinders collapsing in darkness
wildfire coursing through her veins

They won’t just touch my soul and set me free
Eagerly will open the deepest of wounds and fest on my worst fears
Harshly undress my faith and crush my hope

Victoriously laugh to celebrate my doom
Bleed me red to suffer in dry tears
Waltz with my ghost to slowly scatter my temple  

Taunt to enliven my mistakes
Proudly glorifying my shames
Only to win a soul that has been defeated

I sense them overstepping my shadow
The monsters catching up with my heart and mind
Will I score the final touchdown or will they devour me whole

Touch so contagious
The poison burns running wild in my veins
Won’t be long for when I am all at once taken away

numb fingers
but not from the cold

my heart
is just so tired
of missing you
that the blood
falls asleep
in my veins

if your heart once skipped a beat,
That's a pulse missing,
No oxygenated blood flow,
Veins empty as heart left in vain,
Love have arrived.

We die a bit, skips a bit,
only to be reborn in a stranger's shoulders,
Love is the problem and the solution.

It creeps in like a seed,
For sure you will water it
With tear drop
from heart break to miscommunications.

The seed grows
The seed glows.

You ripped my heart apart
like it's the easiest thing to do
Left me in pieces, so peaceful
as if you did not care at all
With every breath I take
loneliness spreads through my veins
like it's poison, trying to **** me
And you?
You kiss other girls,
pretend that hole in your heart doesn't exist
You try to fill the empty space
that your empty promises caused
You tell your friends you're fine
and laugh when they ask if you're thinking about me
But late at night,
when nobody sees,
You look at the pictures of me
saved on your phone
So why do you act so victorious
when obviously we both
lost?

Loose Knit
by Michael R. Burch

She blesses the needle,
fetches fine red stitches,
criss-crossing, embroidering dreams
in the delicate fabric.

And if her hand jerks and twitches in puppet-like fits,
she tells herself
reality is not as threadbare as it seems ...

that a little more darning may gather loose seams.

She weaves an unraveling tapestry
of fatigue and remorse and pain; ...
only the nervously pecking needle
****** her to motion, again and again.

Published by The Chariton Review, Penumbra, Black Bear Review, and Triplopia. Keywords/Tags: Addiction, needle, veins, stitches, red, blood, ******, dreams, hallucinations, seams, darning, tapestry

The unspoken words
grew in my veins till
they intoxicated my mind

A deadly psyche planted inside
a breathing corpse
that’s perpetually dying

When our hands' touch
i feel electricity
run through my veins
like vines turned to ash



and then you pull away
and then you pull away
and then you pull away