Salt Dialects

The tide speaks in a grammar no one taught it — each wave a clause rewriting the shore, erasing its own argument before the period lands.

I learned my first words from the mouths of estuaries, where freshwater stutters into brine and the herons stand like unfinished sentences.

My grandmother salted everything — tomatoes, bread, the rims of stories she told only at dusk. Her hands moved the way water moves when it has forgotten urgency.

Now I live far from any coast and still my tongue finds salt in the vowels of certain words: home, hull, harbor — each one a small ocean folding shut.

Some nights the rain arrives and I open the window just to hear the old dialect, its soft percussion on leaves that have never seen the sea.