Redemption Arc
by Adrian Potter
My dad served in the Army for more than twenty years.
He wrote the lyrics to his blues throughout two wars, long
enough for him to stop lip-syncing someone else’s songs.
And when he went to bars, he could say Crown and Coke
until the words rotted inside his mouth like a sweet tooth
and they’d still pour him another. During those two decades
and change, he had one wife, briefly. After that, he had another,
and later my mother, and then came me, his unexpected son.
We all asked him to be better than he was. But things never work
that way. You can’t expect a live grenade to never explode.
And if he’s back stateside from Vietnam and eleven years later
still hollers out Charlie’s coming let’s fucking move in his sleep,
then he can identify the ghost of an enemy lurking in flashbacks
but cannot recognize one staring back at him from the mirror,
or detect the slow leak deflating his punctured confidence.
My father's favorite war story was silence—so many narratives
started then abruptly ended. A pregnant pause followed by
fierce eye contact with his only child and a gruff ain’t no place
for a black man in a white man’s army. As if that statement
exonerated him from the shouting, insults, and intimidation,
the friendly fire in our household. Often I wished he would talk
about the war, open the reservoir, allow the pain to flow out.
I would have cleaned up the mess afterwards, like all the broken
plates and jostled furniture of his tirades. But things never work
that way. You can’t expect a live grenade to never explode.
We both liked to ask for what we knew we would never get—
closure—elusive as an apology from a bitter soldier.
“My father survived the Korean and Vietnam Wars but paid a steep price with his compromised health. We didn’t get along well during my childhood, but now I recognize that was partly due to PTSD. He died before I turned twenty, and we never hashed out our differences before he passed. This poem represents estimated attempt #392 of using poetry as catharsis—trying to decipher the code of how his mental health issues from war slowly became my unwanted inheritance.” —Adrian S. Potter
Adrian S. Potter, winner of the 2022 Lumiere Review Prose Award, writes poetry and prose in Minnesota when he’s not busy silently judging your beer selection and record collection. He is the author of the poetry collection Everything Wrong Feels Right (Portage Press). Adrian’s words have appeared in the North American Review, The Maine Review, Roads & Bridges, The Comstock Review, and Obsidian. Visit him online at http://adrianspotter.com/.