Jessica Malone Latham

Code Grey

They call it the Grey Divorce. Hair silvered. Skin withered. Children have grown and left, and what remains? Two strangers making their way through awkward conversation? A tangling of body parts that one could recite the other’s every mark and mole?

You are speckled at the temples and my hickory hair holds a strand or two of white. He’s only two years old, and there’s another on the way. Still, I long for the heat of your tongue. I try to recall how my hand made its way so easily into yours.

This is how it begins. You rise for work as I tend to the home, leaving only snippets of time to see one another until even that takes too much effort. Chatter turns to banter, love notes fade. This is how. Slow. Consistent. Like ivy crawling through cracks of light.

ambulance sirens
a mockingbird wakes me
long after you’ve left