The Pekinese Journal                         Neil de la Flor, Maureen Seaton & Kristine Snodgrass

Do not bend your brain around the cheap, the cross-stitched, the bickered or blistered.

o

Your desires may be too small.

Small as a boat? Or small as a pea?

Small as the whip that I pulled out of my

Small as the roundtables that so-and-so covered in green leafy table cloths

Small as the Norbert or Lazarus, or Norbert II or Lazarus II

                       We are on the verge of a boat poem, my dear.

Do not consider nosegays or little drinks.

                       We are on the large of goat koan, my queer.

Do not consider a gay nomad or wild drawing bands.

Have you, you who desire small things, considered the secrets of Norbert?

For example:     Norbert is two.

                        Norbert is fluent in German.

                        Norbert is not Mr.

Can I interrogate Norbert for a moment?

                                                I: Norbert, what is your name?

                                                N: Pantheon, pantheistic, panacea

There is a great swelling, a bellow of bitches now, we feel it in our totalitarianism, it is neither boat nor moment. Desire becomes a frond overhead, switching in a hurricane.

We are fluent in small desires. We are named for dead people.            

                                                T: Do you enjoy the constant beating of the heart?

                                                N: Do you enjoy swimming, small desires?

These are the dead people we are named for: Lakshmi, Cell Phone, The Burning Boy.

I had written before I erased what I had written that we were named after Bohrs, Lilly, and Frances. (These are the dead people we [were] named for—) Don’t waste time trying to figure out the heart of Norbert, or his long name, the one given to him by her, the one we call, “sister”. Do not bend the lines around this cheap diary, the crosshatched marks are blisters of her desire to flee. And if you read closely, backwards a few steps, you’ll find the space where E was supposed to come before T. We are all named in secret.