Salt Dialect

The tide has a grammar no one taught it— subject, verb, the long erasing. Each wave a sentence started then swallowed back before the period.

I stood where the breakwater fractures and listened for the accusative case, the one that names what is acted upon: driftwood, kelp, the open hand.

My grandmother spoke a dialect that sounded like the sea pulling stones. Consonants worn to vowels, every word a smooth thing you could hold against your cheek.

Now the shore composes its own correspondence—foam and sand, the postmark illegible, the return address dissolved.

I am learning to read it still, this salt dialect, this grammar of arrival and recession, where meaning lives not in the word but in the space the water leaves behind.