What the Salt Knows

The tide carries nothing back that left willingly. Still, the shore collects what it can— a bottle's green shoulder, a name worn to almost nothing by the going.

My grandmother kept the sea in a jar on the windowsill. Not water. The light that comes off it when there is nothing left to say.

I have stood at enough edges to know the horizon is a kind of grammar: it names the end of what we can see without naming what is past it.

What the salt knows it does not teach. It only enters the wound and tells you something was there— that you were open once, and the world found its way in.