What the Salt Remembers

The tide pulls back its long white hem and leaves behind a crust of what it carried— mineral, bright, the skeleton of water. You could lick the stone and taste a month ago, a century, a forming world.

My grandmother's hands worked salt into the cut of meat, pressing memory into flesh before it could forget itself. She knew what time does to the soft things, how it hollows them from the inside out.

I have stood at the edge of the Adriatic in October, when the tourists have gone home and the sea speaks only to itself, that low continuous grammar no one ever fully translates.

There are losses I haven't named yet. They sit at the bottom like white stones waiting for the tide to turn them over, to expose the dark underside where nothing has dried.