 Aloha, my name is Derek Otsuji, and I'm a writer from Honolulu, Hawaii. Today, I'm going to be reading you three poems from my recent collection, The Kitchen of Small Hours, published by Southern Illinois University Press. The first poem is The Rabbit in the Moon. I tilted my head back and covered my left eye, while my father, index finger to the moon, traced the profile of a rabbit, a dim figure hidden among lichen splotches on a disc of bleached bone. Eager to see what I had often heard grandma say, that the rabbit is pounding rice cakes for the celebration of the new year, I followed my father's finger with my one open eye and gave close ear to the cadenced narration. Ears, nose, feet, the mallet high above the shoulder, the stone bowl full of sweet rice, coalesced to watercolor shapes beneath the touch of his finger and magic placement of each word. The finished image, frail and gray, was like the shadow cast on the paper screen door of a Japanese house that softly from within. Can you see it? my father asked, finger pressed firm against the moon. I squinted hard, closed my eyes, and as I learned to do with all of tradition's distant truths, what I could not see, I believed. The second poem is a pandemic poem, but it's situated 50 years ago when the pandemic was not covid but tuberculosis. This poem narrates the story of my mother who was only eight years old when her mother contracted tuberculosis and was forced to quarantine in a hospital for over a year. My mother revisits Mahelona Hospital where her mother had been quarantined 50 years ago. Every Sunday that year we drove all the way from Kalaheo to Kapaa town where mother stayed confined to one room. The roads were bumpy. I always felt a little nauseous after the long car ride that seemed like forever. Tubercular prescribed bed rest. She was kept from us. Father would go in to visit her alone while the twins and I stood outside in the middle of the big grassy lawn waiting, looking up up to the second floor until she came to the window and waved at us from there. Funny how the building seemed so much taller back then but of course I was a child and everything looks different to you as a child and maybe too it was that waving at her through the window there up on the second floor. My mother whose terrible love had loomed so close at one stroke seemed so tiny and so far away. The last poem that I'll read is about food because in Hawaii we love food and this is a poem about going to my grandmother's house. I loved going to my grandmother's house as a child because she would always make our favorite food which was fried fish and of course I also had my two brothers with me so this is a story about those visits. Three boys, one fish, two eyes. In a cast iron pan grandma fried whole fish. The skin crisped up gold brown with salt and crust. The eye popped white, a pearl. To eat one just by myself, me, one fish was all my wish but we were three brothers and just one plate. Kneeling on chairs and ready to go in we scraped those flanks clean from the head to fin to tail. To the cooked fish met its bare fate clean and lovely skeletal as a lyre or a venous comb with its spokes of bone. Its popped white eye how like a pearl it shown how we each eyed that pearly eye with desire. We had to junk and pull for that gems prize. We were three boys and one fish with two eyes.