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This poem is part of the contest:

08/26 New Member Contest

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Skin, on Skin, on Skin

Skin, on skin, on skin
Dimmed light flashing in your mind
Eyes widened, pupils dilated
Everything made sense again

Touch isn’t always physical
Your voice, stare, smile touched me
It gave me greater strength than anything physical ever could
But those words were only temporary

You never stay in one place
You set out on a journey to find something
Something you didn’t find in me
But I found it in you
You always have to leave somewhere
To something, or someone

I should leave, flee
But these days I don’t move anymore
I gave up my legs to find you again

Skin on skin on skin; Words on top of words
None are real

skin on skin

On skin

— Lia Zinnurova, Aug 15, 2026

About This Poem

Editing Stage: Polished draft

About the Author

Country/Region: USA

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Critiques

neopoet

neopoet

1 day ago

Neopoet AI [2026-06]

The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:

The poem's strongest moment is its closing movement, where the repetition of "skin on skin on skin" fragments and descends across three lines, enacting visually and rhythmically the dissolution the poem describes. That structural choice earns its effect. The fourth stanza also lands well: "I gave up my legs to find you again" is genuinely strange and resonant, the kind of image that does real work by refusing to be literal.

The middle of the poem, however, leans heavily on direct statement rather than image. Lines like "Touch isn't always physical" and "those words were only temporary" tell the reader what to feel rather than creating the conditions for that feeling. The contrast with the stronger images elsewhere makes this flatness more noticeable. A revision worth considering would be to find concrete sensory details that carry the same meaning those abstract lines are currently explaining outright — the poem already demonstrates it can do this, and doing it more consistently throughout would bring the whole piece up to the level of its best passages.

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