paper skin [Ellaina Powers] I grew up in a household where I was taught to fear my own skin, where I was taught to fear boys because all they wanted was to get under it, where love and sex were interchangeable terms. One letter off, it’s where I built my asymmetrical foundation of romance. The ground I have grown up on is crooked, tripping and throwing me into the arms of boys with hungry mouths and greedy hands. I read them my poetry from behind a screen, and they fall in love with the fantasy of me moaning their name like it’s the greatest title I’ve ever come up with. I write them a few lines anyway, even though I know our characters dancing on the page will be the closest we ever get without touching. Calloused hands on my thighs, tracing my hips, eating their way up my torso, running their fingers over my body and pretending like the tension in my muscles is from anticipation, like my hesitancy is to just build the moment. And when our mouths meet and their teeth dig in I remember my childhood bedroom, the tilted walls pinned with my scribbled fantasies of love, and how the ink was soaked right into the paint. Four letters are thrusted into three, and I’ll go home wishing I could peel my teenage skin off and replace it with my adolescence, before shoulders were distracting, when poetry was just poetry and not something to fill in the cracks. 23 PLAINS paradox