What the Salt Remembers

The tide pulls back and the sand holds the impression of what stood here— a heel, a heel's ghost, then nothing but the thinning of water into wet.

My grandmother kept a jar of sea glass on the sill above the sink. She never said where it came from. The green ones, she told me once, were the oldest grief.

I have been thinking about inheritance— what gets passed without language, the way a body knows to flinch before the door is opened, to reach for warmth before the cold arrives.

The ocean doesn't remember the ships. Only the salt does, and it won't say.