Cartography of Salt

The estuary holds its breath between tides, a gray hesitation where fresh water forgets itself into the sea.

My grandmother drew maps on tablecloths, coffee rings marking the capitals of places she had already fled—her finger tracing borders that no longer exist.

Here is what geography teaches: every delta is a mouth that swallowed the river whole, and the delta remembers nothing, only keeps moving toward open water.

She kept a jar of sand from a beach that was swallowed by a dam. Forty years and still she shook it like a snow globe, watching the particles refuse to settle.

I inherit this restlessness— the need to name what dissolves, to press my thumb into the wet clay of a shore that will not hold a print, to call it home anyway.