spiracles wheeze across bone thoraxes.animals scuttle through mercury whale fall.rectal tongues pry lichen from phallic vents.spiracles ooze sulfur from deep sea ventprisons impregnated with syphilisnecklaces of bone scratched with hieroglyphsby spirochetes and their reddening buds.poison slime sustains a foam of fine roe.large quantities of mercury cascade:limbs tied, cock flagellated trickle blood impregnated with heavy waste metals from obscene veranda literature. bone needs viral etching to incarnate.
carcinisation
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“carcinisation” from LEXICARTOGRAPHIES: by Nicholas Alexander Hayes.
Published by BlazeVOX [books] on May 23, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Nicholas Alexander Hayes.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Nicholas Alexander Hayes is the author of Lexicartographies (BlazeVox, 2023). He is also the author of the chapbooks In Green Carnation (Ethel, 2025) and Amorphous Organics (SurVision, 2019). His work has been featured in the anthologies Contemporary Tangential Surrealist Poetry; Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Poetry: An International Anthology; and Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism. Nicholas lives in Chicago with his husband and cats.
"Nicholas Alexander Hayes's Lexicartographies feels like a microscopic look at an ever-shifting organism, with language serving as a tool for mapping out its evolution and tiniest particles, both fragile and brutal in their raw, naked reality. The sight is as fascinating and awe inspiring as it is disturbing as we glimpse ourselves—our own inescapable nature as biological beings shaped by our desires, history and myths. An extraordinary feat of poetry and form."
—Dominik Miles, editor of SCAB
"Once upon a time, in a natural history museum, a young girl strode into a hall devoted to a skeletal replica of a massive titanosaur—a Cretaceous sauropod—and exclaimed, 'Oh my gosh, a lobster!' And thus the beast coupled with the girl’s word and born was a new animal, a new phylogeny, and a new way to understand evolution. Lexicartographies repeats that moment on every page, uncovering for us the heretofore invisible undefinitions of words, while reminding us that language is as biological as anything else we do—eat, copulate, excrete—and that we live, always, 'between citadel and buttocks.'"
—Eric Elshtain, Field Museum Poet-in-Residence
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