Salt Dialects

The tide speaks in a grammar older than any mouth, pressing its thick syllables against the rocks until they learn to answer in erosion.

I stood where the harbor wall meets the green-dark water and listened for the sentence my grandmother used to finish every time she faced the sea.

She said the waves remember what the land keeps trying to forget — the salt in us, the pull, the way a body knows the depth before the mind agrees.

Now I carry her dialect in the hinge of my wrist, in the pause before I speak. Some words only make sense when the water is close enough to hear them.