Male Model Resting (Nicola d’Inverno)

John Singer Sargent, Oil on Canvas, 1895

You, a nude man in his early forties
frying on the skin
of a widowed-olive Victorian divan.
Ink black hair cum
on that pile of inflated red bolsters.
Your arms sculpt the chamber’s grotesque.
Α torso like yours dictates my very eyes.
The stretching of your trunk.
The extension of the legs.
The penis trapped—
hibernating in your thighs.
And yet, you do not spare me a look.

You, a shattered Colossus—
eyes shut; calves wide open.
In the middle of the fading parlor,
the oak desk and the walnut chair
crowd our distance
with their deafening firewood crosstalk.
Yet, you do not spare me a look.

Cursed to be blind and know only the friction of
your alabaster knees and salty toes.
You needed an East and I quadrated you
at a terminal named The Four Cardinal Points.
You needed a muscle and I mirrored you
in the two and one most common tenses.
How does it feel to ask for a portrait and get a fayum?
I stand in front of your dripping curtains,
cruising right and left,
wanting to checkmate you
in some corner of this waterproof linen.

You still seem puzzled
at what I have whispered in your ear.
The guard said, “Do not touch!”
so, I did not touch, I just whispered:
You know, in Modern Greek, the words γλείφω and γλύφω
sound the same, but for one letter.
They are homo-
phones.
I wish you knew that letter.
I wish I forgot that I
want to lick you the way you want to carve me.
But so little depends upon us.

Anthony Kitsios is a fourth-year student of English at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Among his academic interests are Medieval and Renaissance Literature and their textual and inter/transmedial intersections and contradictions with subjectivity, gender, sexuality, and propaganda. His poetry, which attempts to queer and theatricalize the conventional corpus of poetry, is highly influenced by the work of the Greek poets Ritsos, Livaditis, Laina, and Dimoula.