Salt

Dara Laine

The marsh had places
you could step into—
up to your chest
in brackish water. 

My feet hit bottom.
The same ground.

Salt on the ropes
of the waterman’s boat,
in the wind,
on our hands
after dragging the nets
through the shallows. 

We picked crabs
boiled on the dock.
long after—

my lips tasted like the rope. 

How long salt stays.

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Dara Laine
Dara Laine (she/her) is a poet based in Baltimore, originally from a hay farm in New Jersey. She won the 2026 Bellevue Literary Review Allman Prize for Poetry and was a Tupelo Press 30/30 poet. Her work appears in American Poetry Journal, Westchester Review, and LEON Literary Review. Read more: www.daralaine.com