In Dharker's poem "Tissue," paper is described as both mundane and uniquely powerful. That the material allows light to shine through it could be enough to alter things significantly in the grand scheme of the world. The speaker describes paper that has thinned from age and the many hands that have touched it over the years. This image is specified into a copy of the Koran onto which someone has written family histories over multiple generations. These consist of births, heights, weights, and deaths. The pages themselves were smoothed by touch and turned transparent with attention.
The poet imagines buildings as paper: the way they would easily fall and shift. Maps, too, allow the sun to shine through all the marks that denote borders, rivers, roads, railtracks, and "mountainfolds." All the business records from grocery stores "might fly our lives like paper kites."
The speaker imagines an architect eschewing brick and block to rely only on paper in order to design and build cities. Structures made of paper would allow daylight to break through "the shapes that pride can make" and trace a grand design with living tissue. A structure raised of tissue is not meant to last. It is paper that has been smoothed, stroked, thinned into transparency, and "turned into your skin."
