Salt Library

The tide keeps its own catalog— each wave a page turned back before the sentence ends, the shore rewritten in a cursive only hermit crabs can parse.

I found a jar of sea glass once, green and cornflower and the brown of old medicine bottles, each shard a word the ocean worried smooth of meaning.

My grandmother kept letters in a cedar box that smelled of somewhere else entirely. The ink had gone to lavender, the paper thin as breath.

What the salt takes it also shelves— wooden ribs of hulls, the copper ring she lost at Truro, whole summers dissolved to a taste on the lower lip.

I am learning to read the way water reads: without nostalgia, without margin, taking each thing fully in and giving it back changed.