Fourteen words, three lines and a dash: Cyrelle Campbell's untitled poem, marked only by asterisks, says a great deal in very little space. It is built like a riddle. For three lines we are given paper, tearing and a story, and only the last word, "skin", tells us what we have been looking at. The poem's central idea is that a body can be read like a page, and that some people cannot bear what they find written on it.
The grammar makes the poem more unsettling than it first seems. "Paper torn by those / who don't like the story / written on their body": the word "their" loops back to "those", so the people doing the tearing seem to be the same people who carry the story. On this reading the violence is turned inward, against one's own skin, whether through self-harm, through shame about a scar or a feature, or through the wish to be someone else. The poem never rules out a wider, social reading either, in which a body is marked by a history or an identity that other people, or a whole society, teach it to hate. Campbell doesn't choose between these, and the unnamed "those" lets the idea stretch to fit several kinds of pain.
The central metaphor is simple and exact. Paper is thin, fragile and made for writing, and skin is all of these too. It records things: age, scars, colour, work, weather. By calling the body's surface a page, the poem turns a life into a text, and "story" is its most important word. A story is something you are told and tell, something with a past in it, which suggests the marks on this body were not chosen, or at least not entirely. The passive verbs "torn" and "written" hide their agents. We never learn who wrote the story, only who rejects it.
There is also a gap between the gentle phrasing and the harsh act. "Don't like" is the language of a child refusing food or a reader putting down a disappointing book. Set beside the image of something being ripped, that mildness becomes chilling, as if the poem is noting how small the reason can be for something so destructive. The ordinary diction makes the cruelty feel everyday rather than dramatic.
The sound of the lines supports this. The first line opens on two hard consonants, "paper torn", and ends on the blunt, stressed "those", which points a finger without naming anyone. The long "o" then returns in "don't", "story" and "body", like one low note sounded again and again. "Story" and "body" also work as a near-rhyme, their soft unstressed endings making the second and third lines sound as if they are settling into a cadence. Then the dash cuts in, and the single stressed syllable "skin" lands like a door closing. The lines run roughly five, six and six syllables, so the form is even and calm, but the answer breaks that calm with the shortest line of all. There are no capital letters and no punctuation except the dash, so the poem never raises its voice, which makes what it describes feel even harsher.
The riddle shape also changes how we read. At first "paper torn" suggests a rejected manuscript or a burned letter, an argument about books. "Skin" makes us go back and read the earlier lines again, now with a body in them. The tearing becomes physical and the story becomes personal. The dash works like the answer line in a dictionary, as if the poem were defining the word, and the definition is a wound.
One more thought is worth testing against the poem. Torn paper does not erase the words on it; it only leaves them in damaged pieces. If the same is true of skin, then tearing at it does not remove the story but adds a new line to it, a scar that records the rejection. The poem doesn't say this outright, but its image invites the idea, and the thought is bleak: the attempt to destroy a story becomes part of it.
That is what makes the poem significant. It takes a subject that could easily sound preachy, a person's relationship to their own body and history, and shrinks it to one image a reader will not forget. It trusts the reader to supply the particular pain, and it leaves behind a question: if the body is a page, who has the right to decide which stories on it may stay?