The purpose of this article is to identify styles and identify their interaction in the text of the poem “Manicure” by a Portuguese poet of the early 20th century. Mario de Sa Carneiro. The semantic and compositional complexity of the poem, as well as the absence of any comments on the part of the author, made it difficult to interpret the work by both the contemporaries of the poet and subsequent critics and researchers, producing a kind of cultural vacuum around the text. The poem remained outside the scope of world research for a long time, and in Russia the first quotation of this text was only in 2010. The specifics of the problem and material predetermined the concept of the article, which can be characterized as a “consistent analytical reading” of the text. The analysis of the poetic fabric of “Manicure” is subordinate to the logic of development of the work as a whole; The article sequentially analyzes small fragments of the poem; in conclusion, general information about the context of the poem is provided. This technique allows to introduce the reader to the content of the work and at the same time to fit the poem into its contemporary aesthetic context. Observations of the text allow to conclude that the analyzed work clearly distinguishes the features of two “panEuropean” styles, cultivated mainly in painting - analytical and Orphic cubism, as well as elements of futurism. Intersectionism, an aesthetic project proposed by Portuguese modernists, is interpreted here as a kind of aesthetic synthesis. The analysis of particular fragments of the text of the poem allows us to consider some passages of the work from the point of the future origin of our contemporary aesthetic projects, such as happenings.