Nicholas Alexander Hayes


Bad Horse

Zamyatin sits
on my chest,
flicking his Hegel
across my lips.

Bare heels press into my solar plexus
as organelles
stretch, flatten, flow
over, through, with
struggling limbs and sloughing skin.

I choke on air
toxic with burning plastic.
A crisis to its climax,
dressed tightly in my skin, 
presses lips to
bleeding forehead and leaves.

Zamyatin shuffles behind.

And I am left to graft
etheric tissues to my wounds
before delirium or silence.



Anchorite

Velvet bile pours from the 
vantablack interior of the ossuary.
Crystals interlocked absorb light 

and Fr. Rolfe
delivers his homily
in the language of cats

to Toto resting his pale ass
on a mound of skulls
cemented with niter and nacre.

A warm glow provides
ghoul lighting for
the faun’s pendulous scrotum,

and the ersatz priest
purrs his grief for St. Barlaam
who failed to re-imprison
Josaphat or to break him on the wheel.

Nicholas Alexander Hayes is the author of Amorphous Organics (SurVision Books), Ante-Animots: Idioms and Tales (BlazeVOX), NIV: 39 & 27 (BlazeVOX), and ThirdSexPot (Beard of Bees). His work has been featured in the anthologies Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman and Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism.

 
 

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