growing smaller
t. kilgore splake
rich, dark hair, black as a starless Croatian night in the
ols country, gift from ancient ancestors, beautiful she-girl-
woman, facial lines sculpted like barren fjord stone along
the Adriatic, her perfect femme mold broken at birth,
crushed, mixed with hardscrabble dust,
married young, first-love boy, quickly whelping husky
man-bolld-children, endless routine of making meals,
washing soiled underwear,
now morning he reaches for the bottle before getting
out of bed, carries his life-saving breakfast to the kitchen
table, no longer hiding the “start” from the kids in coffee,
stale voice asking about lottery numbers, saying “maybe
today,” tired breaths trailing off,
keeping family together waitressing days, tending
bar nights, continuous round of cold black coffee, bitter
cigarettes, lost in distant stare,
last week, month, a year ago, said he’d go for treatment
if he had something to wear to the clinic, suit still boxed, top
closet shelf,
nights alone, tenderness, warmth, love on a forgotten-
past lifetime, future, cold absence of possibility,
feeling so old and tint in so larege a bed, slowing growing
smaller, a dwarf, midget, soo to disappear.