Ocean Vuong - Daily Bread lyrics

Cu Chi, Vietnam Red is only black remembering. Early dark & the baker wakes to press what's left of the year into flour & water. Or rather, he's reshaping the curve of her pale calf atmosphered by a landmine left ober from the war he can't recall. A fistful of hay & the oven scarlets. Alfafa Forsythia. Foxglove. Bubbling dough. When it's done, he'll tear open the yeasty steam only to find his palms---the same as when he was young. When heaviness was not measured by weight but distance. He'll climb the spiral staircase & call her name. He'll imagine the softness of bread as he peels back the wool blanket, raises her phantom limb to his lips as each kiss dissolves down her air-light ankles. & he will never see the pleasure this brings to her face. Because in my hurry to make her real, make her here, I will forget to write a bit of light into the room. Because my hands were always brief & dim as my father's. & it will start to rain. I won't even think to put a roof over the house-- her prosthetic leg on the nightstand, the clack clack as it fills to the brim. Listen, the year is gone. I know nothing of my country. I write things down. I build a life & tear it apart & the sun keeps shining. Crescent wave. Salt-spray. Tsunami. I have enough ink to give you the sea but not the ships, but it's my book & I'll say anything just to stay inside this skin. Sa**afras. Douglas fir. Sextant & compa**. Let's call this autumn where my father sits in a $40 motel outside Fresno, rattling from the whisky again. His fingers blurred like a photograph. Marvin on the stereo pleading brother, brother. & how could I have known, that by pressing this pen to paper, I was touching us back from extinction? That we were more than black ink on the bone -white backs of angels facedown in the blazing orchard. Ink poured into the shape of a woman's calf. A woman I could go back & erase & erase but I won't. I won't tell you how the mouth will never be honest as its teeth. How this bread, daily broken, dipped in honey--& lifted with exodus tongues, like any other lie--is only true as your trust in hunger. How my father, all famine & fissure, will wake at 4 a.m. in a windowless room & not remember his legs. Go head, baby, he will say, put your han on mai bak, because he will believe I am really there, that his son has been standing behind him all these years. Put yor hans on my showduh, he will say to the cigarette smoke swirling into the ghost of a boy, Now flap. Yeah, lye dat, baby. Flap lye yu waving gootbai. See? I telling yu... I telling yu. Yor daddy? He fly.