Lines to Be Tied to Garment Tags in the Underwear Section of a Department Store

Anna Lena Phillips Bell

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.