What the Salt Remembers

The tide withdraws like a sentence left unfinished, dragging its syllables back into the throat of the sea.

What stays behind: a grammar of shells, the ribbed and hollow words of creatures who spoke only by living.

My grandmother pressed one to my ear and said listen—not to the ocean but to the shape of your own blood moving.

I am still learning what she meant. The salt in me is old, pre-verbal, drawn from some first dissolving.

At low tide the flats go silver, holding sky the way the mind holds grief: not in pieces, but as weather.