NO ONE POURED ANYTHING OUT, NO ONE WAS REAL
by HENRY TARTT


November 19 2025


The second eye follows
The first shut
Reveling in curtain slumber
There is no want to return
Just returning

Rattled rails spark
One 4th of July when
They painted my gay little nails
Like a famous flame
    or a bomb (hum)
pop
—- Screeching amber
Iterations of Kate’s junkyard
Into a new lawn
Each passing second

Damned yards,
relocated department stores
open graves
Flags of rotted lumber
and broken glass
some blood that leads
to older bleeding- punctuated by more trash
and

Halogen’s persistent cry
A year of peace on Heron Dr
The ooze of Mercury green
Everything foliage*

*say it again to yourself like a bastard with your eyes closed. . Pretend your hand is a rosary, pretend your chest is a deep depression— now a sinkhole, and it renders so weird and bad forced upon you in a language of crassness only understood by—

Metastasizing Violet on a vine
of cheap LED Headlights

I mapped bits of you
Faded on county markers
Endless asphalt tongues
pierced with potholes
sprouting hellish exits
in the ruins
of masonic castles
outside of Union (AL)
in the
Totemic hay bale sculptures
That ward the wickedness of my hometown

To be sent off
With 6 consecutive hugs
And a detached smile

As an escape

You cried looking up at me
we were there one more time

As an escape

When I own nothing
because I owned nothing in the start

Crossed arms in costume jewelry|
Inventing new gestures as crutches
Envying
The succinct
and the dead





Henry is a practicing nun with a checkered past in East St. Louis.

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