Another day goes by when Ma and her boom waitress uniform stops me reading the open tribune. To dictate precisely at 3.30 p.m. the next day's menu, our right Ma says in English, tomorrow we'll serve the baked spaghetti, feasted with potatoes and carrots, fried rice of lamb and boiled ox tongue with Spanish sauce. My Ma's of waters, as she decides the next day's special, Ma doesn't need to say reddit for your cutlets, fried oysters or prime rib of beef, because they were always on the menu every day. Though I can write in shorthand, I scribble the specials in long hand and step down into Bobbos office and insert a piece of paper into the old royal typewriter. I typed tomorrow's menu watching the purple letters and throwing it like soldiers marching in unison, filling the paper such plums and grapes for our daily lives. I proofread carefully the type menu, making sure I typed the correct specials that Ma dictated, making sure that each item is spelled correctly because spell check was a futuristic poin. With the labor of my fingers, my eyes, my back staring at the list of items that range from how of a steak for 50 cents, to prime rib of beef for 95 cents, knowing that my fingers helped to support the family and my secretarial skills of blip of the family business, known as the Great China Restaurant. I don't want, at 723 Webster Street in Chandon, Aloplin, California. With my sisters and I labored without wage but survived with tips and alopflon, beep over rice, served as bipodgloom, they had coked with ma and ba ba, weren't looking. When World War II filled the Great China with customers, picky of mylonse jewelers, Mr. Carlson of Carlson's confectionery, Johnny Deboxer and his girlfriend Lucille, with her ruby red lips and white teeth. Plongdoi, single men, families, pensioners, workers from gas stations, the parachute factory, and herb and poultry stores. Tenants from the Aloha Hotel, gypsies with her love for bowls, of steamed rice, overflowing with gravy. Typing the menu a job I didn't apply for, but became mine in between making coffee, milkshakes, and lettuce, sentimental salads, anxious for tips that filled the glasses kept beneath the four-micro counter. Understanding even then that money grew not on trees, but through our labor, typing the menu, drawing silverware, stringy string beans, refilling granulated sugar jars, washing the coffee urn on tiptoes, sweeping, mopping, ba ba, inventorying, and planning the next day supplies, vegetable oil, flour, 50 pounds sats of rice, and white steak joll, the great china restaurant, or second home. Sandwich between regular school and Chinese school, our days of wonder, questions, fatigue, anticipation, and simmering American creams. And this is my sister, Florida, if you buy a bowl, you'll have your own coffee, and the places where Leslie smoking a cigarette and beating the menu in the back room. We sat in the back booth and ate our meals, as soon as customers came up, we went to work. And the other poem I'll share with you is, one that's in my own book, I have several books of poetry published, and this is called Reminiscing about a Chinese restaurant. Last night, a dinner at a Chinese restaurant, roast pork and mashed potatoes, rice, and corn, a wedge of custard pie. Others were eating rice with bean cake and chasou, one man a corn, beef and cabbage, and shimmering yellow cubes, glasses, clams, silverware, shrimp, oil, and sizzle to another Chinese restaurant of Chinatown, a girl who watched glasses, white forks, knives, and spoons who typed the next day's menu, whose squeeze oranges reduced large, small, but always fresh. In the back kitchen, and damp air, a man baked aqua pies, and banana shortcake. A cigarette dangles from his mouth, his eyes have closed. When the afternoon off comes, he shuffles off to his rented room, pulls up his sleeve, sticks a needle into his arm. He escapes orange delicious, and I run up stairs, stuff myself with strawberry pie, my skin rises and hides, my skin wants orange, wants delicious, I await him. More dishes, more menus, I refill the sugar jars, granules, barker, I cover them up, and salt shakers, take precedence on a form like a counter in wooden wounds. Slide and run, run and slide, wait on those who inhabit this Chinese restaurant, a man with a crutch and one leg limps downstairs from the Aloha Hotel, sips his dinner of la coffee and sugared bombs. A schweiner and his wife with wide smiles, a hell of a stake, riced and gravy and apapied. Their schweiner shakes his tassel with authority. He splits one six-decent dinner. For his two young daughters. Three slices of hoax bread for our glass-eyed customer, who smears ketchup on each slice, thick juicy oozing over the plate. The man paints bread in my father's eyes, who shocks to me. Give him the bottle with a quarter inch ketchup, and people not survive. Not survive. A young Jersey girl and a salo-man sit in the back booth. He lifts her skirt, caresses her thigh, feeds her a spoon, a voice, she shivers, I look away. A gas station attendant peeps behind the American menu, one eye on the other waitress, his lips part, and he orders laying a lamb with mint jelly. His money is good, his green. He pays to eat and look at the other waitress. And I eat and my skin, it just knows nothing, not his hives, his question marks. I return to the Chinese restaurant, his blinking coffee cup neon sign. I read the menu, examine it inside out. The ink spills, the calligraphy sprawls. This Chinese restaurant demands love, demands attention. As walls expand, I slither inside. What with the glasses, the ovens, and chopsticks tell, what grease on uniform, what language beyond food. This is called Breakfast Lunch Dinner. In fact, it's the title of my next book, this coming out hopefully this summer. And it's a book to poetry a lot, and it has to do with food, but others, to put on activists as well, and writers, and the movies, and jazz, and talk about other things. So it's just not one thing, but I thought you really appropriate to read this here. And so often you see the signs of a restaurant that Breakfast Lunch Derevice. That'd be a good title. So I wrote this, Breakfast Lunch Dinner. Breakfast. The night before I placed the turkey carcass in the huge pot, turned the water to boiling. I feel a fill of rice bowl with raw rice, sprinkled pinch of salt, and dip two teaspoons of vegetable oil to prepare the rice. Two hours later, the turkey meat balls off the bones, the work of the carcass confedza. Next, I pour the rice into the pot that it boiled in simmer. Now for breakfast. I lay no full guide joke into a bowl, impressed with the shape of kernels of rice, with chopped scallion and shreds of turkey meat. Before I eat, I impale the fragrance of love. Then, begin to swallow the full guide joke, as if it's my last meal, lunch. The waitress places a square weight plate for me. I pull my green chopsticks ready. My eyes take in a pyramid of green papaya, matchstick thin, with sliver carrots in the dressing, of lime juice, fish sauce, and bird's eyes pepper. Coins of dichonic carrot decorate the four corners of the plate, white and orange moons convene before seasons. Picking up a soy sauce dish of chopped penis, I shower the salad. My eyes flirting with the next customers, bowl of food. I'm toxicated now with deep fried onion rings, and basil leaves crowning my lunch, I guide the salad into my mouth. Dinner. Baba steams the jingle band, topped with hungry, salted fish preserved for the soul, long tosses slices of fuzzy squash into the wok, as they dance in concert with garlic and onion. Bolts of steamed eggs and our food, greased the table, and yes, the bowl of soup, with sliced bloc just root, a knob of ginger root, and fresh green onions floating on top. The soup, translucent and fragrant steaming, perils the sit down dinner, the family has once a week, on our Wednesday night off from six days of work, at the Great China restaurant. Thank you.