Excess Aspects of
Irreversible Triptychs



if the mode of my voice is iffy-errant-noise it’s just cause I’m
shirking a 33,333-thing’d flood of storm-spurred supra-thing-
ness drowning museums so as to maybe likely swamp a star
painter’s: oeuvre: canvases, lavish, yet innately elusive,

antic; frames: tunnels of stillness, fleeingly-cinched,
stuck-manic; skin: a midpoint form, estranging law from absence...
but if the telos of the tongue is the flood’s very froth

mashed Space may un-self a sumptuous opus while sea-seizing
swoops sweep this old-timey port city at tides’ whims

wielding: pigment: scrap of pure eye, innumerably niched by hue;
impasto: a modern flourish, devoutly inconstant, willful,
thick; teeth: form-full largely so as to functionally enforce form’s

loss... & as the rains spin-toss-spin now I sulk therein as if I’m calm
 estranged kin... until, wait, what do I chance upon but the singular

painter’s canal-niched person begging that I (a fan-stranger!) hop in
& salvage: masterpieces: a valuation, plural, evoking an ever more

obsolete capacity for endurance; palette: lucky, apparently,
  but hardly worth the risk; painter: ahem, well, now we speak of what’s
urgent... & I though do jump in—disaster sure does have

limbs


Steve Barbaro's fiction appears in Denver Quarterly, Web Conjunctions, and 3:AM, and his poems can be found in such venues as The Yale Review, New American Writing, The Common, The Rupture, and DIAGRAM. He is also the founder and editor of new_sinews, a journal of new literature. Find him amidst the tweetsphere @iLLepitaph.


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