What the Salt Carries

The tide pulls back the way a hand withdraws after touching something it knows it cannot keep.

Somewhere a child is learning that water has no loyalty— only appetite, only the long swallowing return.

My grandmother kept a jar of sand from a shore I never saw. By the time I held it the grains had shifted into a shape no coast would recognize.

This is how we are made: deposited, rearranged, carried somewhere the water no longer needs us.

Still the salt comes. Still the light spreads flat across the aftermath, naming nothing, illuminating everything.