Salt Libraries

The tide keeps its own catalogue— each wave a spine cracked open, pages scattering into froth.

I found a shell once that held the exact pitch of my mother's laughter before she learned to measure it, before the rooms grew careful.

There are libraries beneath the salt where nothing is alphabetized, where jellyfish drift between the stacks trailing luminous bookmarks, and the octopus reads with all eight hands.

What the ocean files away it never quite returns the same: driftwood polished into vowels, sea glass ground from sentences someone meant to keep.

I stand at the shore with empty arms and the water brings me not what I lost but what it made from the losing.