Salt Margins

The tide pulls back its silver tongue and leaves a sentence on the rock — calcium cursive, barnacle braille, each word a century of saying nothing to the cliffs that listen anyway.

I walked the salt margins at dusk where foam dissolved like unfinished thoughts, the horizon stitching sea to sky with a thread too fine to hold.

Somewhere beneath, the continental shelf remembers every river's confession, silt settling into sediment, the slow archive of what the land could not keep to itself.

A cormorant folds into the swell, surfaces with something bright and struggling. Even hunger here looks like grace — the plunge, the rising, the swallow whole.

What the ocean takes it does not return in the same shape. Driftwood was a door once. Glass was a bottle someone pressed against their lips. The shore collects these translations and calls them sand.