in Harlem a storefront restaurant pouring into a street a mélange of sweet, spicy, intensely fiery pepper, bitter scent pulls me into first, last Chinese-Cuba café, waiter hands over bi-lingual menu, half Mandarin, half Spanish, can't read either, so randomly point, & in a few minutes appears a massive dish of noodles in black bean sauce, but not ragingly salty Chinese black beans, rather Cuban beans dressed with cumin, possibly cinnamon, taste on tongue some massive signifying of or on Mao and Fidel, that's superficial tasting, with deeper tasting Paris and Miami exiles playing dominos, halfheartedly, because an elsewhere calls, where a menu coheres within a single cuisine they order from, even knotted translucent bean threads don't know who to become, Confucian sage sermonizing, or Santeria priest drumming, and after all, its only a curious dish, not as if this lunch has legs and leaves the premises, not knowing whether to head to Havana or Beijing, but within this sentence diced from a 60s memory, set this dish in front of an ancestral altar, neither Cuban nor Confucian, both, with each current discrete, strictly parallel, add a pinch here and there, Russian, Jewish, Jamaican, American, chance making of scents a complex sense, swallow it because this dish declares a future where there's no better dish to dive into, or die with no fonder memory than this chance occasioned by having to point, speechless