The Law of Hems
The garment’s border is its riverbank, a grass gully, the road’s thick, rocky shoulder. It can be referred to as a hem.
Hems can be taken up or down, hewn as tides turn, as styles resurge. They must be pinned straight, invisible thread butterfly-kissing the weave with equidistant leaps like bunnies bounding along the boundary of a rabbit-proof fence.
An iron’s press encircles the hedge of cloth, leaving a semi-permanent edge.
In the police procedural, the perp wears an A-line skirt, one she slipped over her hips, flattened against her flattering torso. She’s fringed by others in the lineup, a hem of women sharing a hemline, scalloped details that readers mind-limn as they scan the book’s deckled hem before being carried off by the dream’s luminous drift.
Meandering along the verges of dawn, sometimes, a hemline falls, and one fails to distinguish the frame around one’s life. One might become a border in one’s own home, a husband stealer, a burglar of identity, one’s untended hem sweeping messily across the floor.
Though, mostly, hems are in order. Selvages, mercifully, protect from inopportune fraying of one’s fabric. For a time, that is. A short time. One doesn’t consider the falling of future hems, in the way one doesn’t consider the spilling of liquified bones or the contracting of Hecate-itis, how one’s body tyrannically takes wing, flies through ancient old-growth boles in mortar saucers, disinherits one’s dignity.
A hem of daisies, which had always rimmed the lapping bank, suddenly, hardily, clogs the tarn with treacly florets. Hummingbirds, whose vocalizing wing had always hemmed in lupine spikes, now bomb drive in zig-zagging disarray. Time mocks the hem. The hem will fall.
This moment’s hem loosely unfolds. The perp slurs utterances of half-forgotten vics; a ghosting jury hems her in. She cannot remember names with her mind-hemming hippocampus. She cannot abide by the bars of the women’s prison that has been assigned her since she’s been confirmed in the identity parade and is on 24-hour watch as the hem of morning and evening meet in a midline incision.
She is at an operating party on the operating table; she is under the sewing machine needle, wrong side up and folded into an unnoticeable hem, slip stitched, unseen. Unseamed.
Martine Bellen is the author of nine collections of poetry, including GHOSTS! (Spuyten Duyvil); THE VULNERABILITY OF ORDER (Copper Canyon Press); TALES OF MURASKI AND OTHER POEMS (Sun & Moon Press), which won the National Poetry Series Award; and, most recently, THIS AMAZING CAGE OF LIGHT: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (Spuyten Duyvil). Her forthcoming collection, AN ANATOMY OF CURIOSITY, will be published by MadHat Press in 2022. Her poetry has been translated into Chinese, German, and Italian, among other languages. She's a recipient of the Queens Art Fund, New York Foundation for the Arts, and has received a residency from the Rockefeller Foundation at the Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy. For more information about her work (poems and videos of operas for which she has written libretti), visit: www.martinebellen.com.