Salt Dialects

The tide has a grammar no one transcribes— each wave a clause revising the one before, the reef a parenthetical the current keeps forgetting then remembering, then forgetting again.

I learned my first words from water like this, the bay pronouncing my name in foam against the hull of a boat that has long since gone to nails and kindling.

There are whole vocabularies in brine, salt dialects the kelp translates into slow, lateral sentences only the crabs bother to parse.

My grandmother spoke this way toward the end— in tides, in ellipses, her voice arriving and retreating across the floorboards of a room that smelled of iodine and August.

Now I stand where the shoreline edits itself with every hour, and I am fluent in nothing but the listening.