Salt Dialects

The tide speaks in a grammar older than any continent, each wave a sentence broken across the rocks' blunt teeth.

I have listened at the shore where kelp drags its dark cursive over sand still holding the warmth of afternoon.

There is a dialect the salt teaches only to those who stay past dusk, when the water turns the color of a bruise forgetting itself, and the first stars stammer open.

My mother knew this language once, carried it in the hollow of her collarbones, in the way she hummed while folding sheets still stiff with sun.

Now I stand where the foam erases every word it writes, learning again the patience of a mouth that never closes, that says everything and means the sea.