What the Salt Remembers

The tide withdraws its long white hem and leaves behind a grammar of shells, each one a sentence the sea once meant and could not finish.

My grandmother kept a jar of sand on the windowsill in Brno, far from any coast— she said it remembered the water for her, held the cold weight of forgetting.

I press my thumb into the wet flats and the impression fills slowly, not with water but with light, the way a name you've lost rises unexpectedly at dinner.

The salt does not distinguish what it took from what it gave. It circles back— the herring's eye, the child's knee, the body returned to what carried it.

Tonight the moon hauls the sea a few inches closer to the land and I stand at the edge of the possible, tasting what comes.