July-23

I dry in salt flats under furnace

sparkling like the Pacific.
Last year, a boy drowned in the riptide,
my grandfather tells my mother, both eight;
He was a terror over my family, and his passing
was like a fever breaking. They find fossils
here, in this salt. They fossilized my grandfather too,
in me – my middle names, his names –
the work of that salt a preservative
as how my fingers work to preserve my anger
into the flakes
digging and combing and burying,
to be forgotten by me but only by me,
that within me which cannot brine.

When the Pacific boils and dries,
and goes to salt,
may it preserve that boy too