Cartography of Salt

The estuary remembers everything— each tide that pressed its tongue against the reed-beds, each body of rain dissolved into something neither river nor sea.

My grandmother's hands were like that. Holding the bread, the child, the phone until none of it stayed, until she became the space between.

Some geographies can't be mapped, only walked into slowly, the way fog takes the harbor and the harbor doesn't fight.

I've been learning to read the white margins of old charts— where the known world ends and the cartographer wrote simply: water.

What the salt remembers the tongue eventually forgets. What the fog takes the morning gives back changed.