Waiting on Death in Jackson, Mississippi

By Max Sutton

Little seems happening. The drip

ticks. Oxygen in a steady wheeze

sifts from the machine. Her chest lifts,

falls, lifts, falls, an old oak rocker

on a worn pine floor. “I’m happy,”

she said, and then stopped talking.

Does she feel pain, a daughter

asks her father in a dream.

“Not much, honey,” he says,

having died some time before.

“This is how it has to be.”

His gray sedan idles in midsummer

dusk, a shadow in the seat beside him.

Upstairs in the plantation house

her light stays on. He taxis off,

sixty-seven years her husband,

chauffeur for more, circling

the mansion, ready

when she is ready.

– Max Sutton lives in Eudora.