after John Brack’s 1970 oil painting
Awkwardly balanced, I stand
like a toddler on the pink carpet,
one arm supported by the only
furniture in the room, a chair.
Did I mention that I am nude,
or that a man older than my father
stares at my pink backside?
I gaze vapidly into the corner
as though being punished.
What kind of artist has walls
as naked as daylight?
How can he not notice
that the carpet is askew, not square
with the boards of the floor?
I do not speak, nor does he,
the only sound, a scratching
against the canvas, aberrant
strokes I count like ticks of a clock.
I’m paid well for what I do.
Sometimes I don’t have to do a thing.
Scott Wiggerman is the author of Vegetables and Other Relationships (Plain View
Press, 2000) and editor of the Texas Poetry Calendar (Dos Gatos Press), now in its
twelfth year. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Borderlands:
Texas Poetry Review, Poesia, Contemporary Sonnet, Visions International, Spillway,
Sojourn, and the Paterson Literary Review. In addition, his poems appear in several
anthologies, including This New Breed: Gents, Bad Boys and Barbarians 2 (Windstorm
Creative, 2004), In the Arms of Words: Poems for Disaster Relief (Sherman Asher,
2006), The Weight of Addition (Mutabilis Press, 2007), and Poem, Revised (Marion
Street Press, 2008). He also edited an anthology of Texas poetry, Big Land, Big Sky,
Big Hair (2008).