Salt Margin

The tide pulls back its grey silk and the rocks appear like knuckles, gripping what the current left behind.

I walked here once with someone whose name has worn to vowels, a sound the gulls could almost make if they were trying to say sorry.

Barnacles hold their small doors shut. The kelp has written cursive across every surface it can reach, illegible, insistent, green.

There is a pool the size of a bowl where an anemone opens its hundred soft fingers to nothing, practicing the gesture of welcome long after the guests have gone.

I press my palm against the wet stone and feel the earth's slow pulse, the patience of a thing that lets the sea erase it and calls the loss a shore.