Cartography of Salt

The tide charts were wrong again— my grandmother folded them into cranes and set them on the windowsill to dry, as if paper birds could correct what water had already decided.

She mapped the shoreline by taste, pressed her tongue to the air and said: the storm comes from the north, it carries what the river left unfinished.

I have inherited her salt. It rises in my throat when I pass certain houses, certain silences— the body's own cartography.

Now I draw coastlines with my finger on fogged glass, tracing what shifts between seasons, the estuary expanding, the solid ground revising itself.

Everything I was certain of has moved a little to the left. I keep the cranes. I keep the salt. I do not keep the maps.