Lines to Be Tied to Garment Tags in the Underwear Section of a Department Store
Anna Lena Phillips Bell
Image by Patrick Kool
Riddle
I tell the secrets of your flesh,
your bones, your joints, your every crease,
imply the clothes beneath your clothes
and thus the lack of clothes beneath.
Moral
Risk the seam, the hinge, the way we’re made
(like the lover in that tale, who wore
a velvet ribbon round her neck, and when
her lover pulled the ends, her head fell off)
and be unsewn, unknown, undone.
Plea
Little thong, who made thee?
We cannot know who made thee.
We know they went home wearily
if they went home at all.
Enumeration
One ring to hold the left
One ring to circle the smooth of the lower back and the place to rest a hand in decisiveness
or hold on to and the hip bone and the soft expanse below the belly button and the other
hip bone and the other place to hold on to or on which to rest a hand in decisiveness
One ring to hold the right
Ode
O skin that folds around the leg
of a cat, or of a dinosaur,
bedecked in scales or protofeathers,
bald or concealed in handsome fur—
O margin marked by excess, room
for shift, for leap, for curl and purr—
Rhyme
Boy-short, bikini, hipster, brief,
How many thread-lines will you leave
on the skin when taken off?
We show your absence in relief.
Imperative
Be not an insult to our forms but a reification of them.
Be grown by someone paid well for their labors.
Be longer lasting than a week or a whim.
Be sewn by someone paid well for their labors.
Be made of cotton, linen, silk—anything but plastic.
Be, nonetheless, a little elastic.
Spell
Bring chalk, bring piping, boldest rule
that ever measured out a curve.
Line in neon rickrack, gold
stem-stitched down the fabric’s fall,
to sign the parts where parts confer,
where joints rest in themselves, and move.
Anna Lena Phillips Bell
Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St. Brigid Press. New writing appears in Five Points, Subtropics, and the Florida Review, and in anthologies including A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia and Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene. Bell teaches at UNC Wilmington, where she is editor of Ecotone, and calls ungendered Appalachian square dances in North Carolina and beyond. todointhenewyear.net