The Long Memory of Salt

Before the table, before the bread, it was a tide leaning its whole weight against a coastline that forgot to argue. Every wave a small surrender, every drying pool a held breath.

The sun does the patient work of theft, lifting the water and leaving the want behind— white crust on a black rock, a grammar of crystals spelling out the absence of the sea.

In the cellar of the cupboard it waits, keeping the cold logic of squares, each grain a tiny architecture that once was current, was depth, was the silver muscle of a fish.

Now it falls from my fingers onto the wound, onto the egg, onto the rim of the glass at the wedding— and the ocean, far off and unbothered, tastes for a moment of someone's mouth.

We are mostly water learning to leave. What stays is the mineral, the bright residue, the part of the wave that refuses to forget it was ever anything but here.