Correct the Record, Can We?
What if I told you he wasn’t that bad?
That you couldn’t smell it on his breath
after all, & that he wasn’t one of the loud ones
the way he is in all my poems? Not at all
like the viral headlines made him seem? What if
I told you he smiled in PTA meetings & never spoke first?
That he sat on the sidelines at little league games
& laughed with other parents? That he loves to sink
his soft hands into soil & clip the crisped
edges of dog-tongue rhododendron leaves because
they make him feel small? What if I told you
he sits in church basements with other white-whiskered
men to talk about how proud they all are of their
gay sons? & the whirling manic I cartoon him to be
in line at the rehab hospital, or barking through
car windows with an open Sauv Blanc bottle
cinched between his khakis—what if I said
that was all mostly for me?
Copyright © 2026 by Adam Falkner. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 21, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem emerges from my ongoing attempt to better understand my father, whose struggle with alcohol and addiction shaped much of the story I once told about him—and myself. Themes of queerness and inheritance thread through much of my work, but this poem tries to press into more personal questions of care and reckoning. For years, I carried a version of him that served me—a story of damage I could point to, explain myself through—but it often left out his tenderness. Humor. The ways he shaped me beyond his pain. Writing this became a quiet meditation on forgiveness (for both of us) and a new way of asking: What else is true? What beauty lives alongside the wound? What does it mean to carry all of it forward?”
—Adam Falkner
Adam Falkner
Adam Falkner is a writer, performer, and educator.
He is the author of The Willies (Button Poetry, 2020), winner of the 2020 Midwest Book Award for Debut Poetry. A founding partner of Dialogue Arts Project, Falkner lives in Brooklyn, New York, on Lenape land.