Beeline Highway, Old salem road, cathy’s lane

Kate Bailey

Are some of the streets I drive down 

after learning of my paternal grandmother's death

where two crane-like machines arch 

on the hilled Tennessee horizon.

They are like Land Before Time, 

these beasts of agriculture, 

decidedly herbivore and definitely kin. 

Mother long-neck, her Little Foot--

for him, she would do anything,

would fend off a T-Rex and nobly die.

As a child I wept without context, 

flat fiction of maternal death.

Forgetting my own mom at age 4, 

her mother (my namesake)

ascending 

on the wings of medical negligence.

Loss like a whale-fall, a whole new

ecosystem thudding the black ocean floor.

Or the verdant ground of a Mississippi cemetery--

the 67 pounds 

my father’s mother clung to, now

light as ash. 

My little cousins played at the burial,

squeezing fistfuls of red earth 

over a box, a wedding band.

I rolled sweat, pinched ants that stung my ankles. 

As she was dying,

I was driving away from home

reading billboards and church letter boards:

GET READY

GET READY

GET READY

She kept her sickness like a secret for the first year,

did not allow us this church-sign luxury. 

Then, left only

a clip on her iPhone, 

cloudy fentanyl eyes,

shaky kiss to the camera. 

-- a goodbye? 

Unlike T-Rex, 

cancer is a persistence hunter.