What the Salt Remembers

The tide pulls back like a held breath, leaving behind its small confessions— shells turned to mouths, still open, saying the name of whatever drowned them.

I have stood at the edge of things where the water keeps rewriting itself, each wave a revision, each retreat an admission that nothing stays said.

My grandmother's hands smelled of salt long after she forgot the sea. The body keeps its oldest languages in places the mind cannot reach.

There is a kind of grief that lives in thresholds— the door just opened, the light just changed, the moment before the word arrives that will make everything different.

Even now the water is composing its argument against permanence, dragging the shore a little farther into what we used to call shore.