Salt

once, in America, I told a girl white as salt
              that I used to shake it straight from
its silver can into my mouth, & swallow.

              she told me to stop lying. but I’m the kind
of human who scrapes & pinches the crumbs
              at the bottom of the bag of hot chips, who licks

thumb & pointer pad thorough, slick with
              the sheen of my spit. I long for salt even as
I wash it off my hands—cuffs curling inward

              under running water, devil’s kisses, crimped
with salt—reach for salt over sugar. to be
              not worth your salt means you are doing

a lousy job. but even a 100 pound human
              has nearly 40 teaspoons of table salt naturally
occurring in the body—a concentration

              nearly equal to that in seawater. salt is
the only family of rocks regularly eaten
              by people. really we are all pillars of salt.

I palm mounds of it to coat my inner cheeks,
              pop in a cherry tomato and chomp until
skin bursts to seed. I suck slow & long just

              as an infant feeds greedy from a mother.
my lips blister from too much salt: tongue
              scraping raw against front teeth, the roof

of my mouth peeling in patches. perhaps
              I was looking for salt in myself, or maybe
I was looking for a similar pain—like when

              a person chews their fingernails down until
they bleed. imagine dipping those fingers into
              a vat of salt. salt regulates electrical charges

going in & out of our cells. it helps with
              the transmission of nerve impulses. but
my brown will never be the color of salt.

              is that why I seek it—because it’s not mine?
still, I won’t let any saltbody accuse me
              of lying. yes, when I eat, I salt the bitter,

& the sour, & even the sweet. pale jicama dipped
              in vinegar & salt—green mango paired with
a dollop of fermented shrimp—pickled ampalaya

              grown in my mama’s backyard garden, where
she’d never salt the slugs. I, too, want to become
              & keep becoming, leaving a trail of myself 

as I move into the future, that amorphous point
              in space & time where things emerge, just as
a seed cracks through salt & soil with intention.

              my guess is, our salt moves forward to future us—
that this accounts for our subtle kineticism,
              even as we think we are standing still.

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Originally from Baguio City in the Philippines, Ina Cariño is a 2022 Whiting Award winner for poetry. Their work appears in the American Poetry Review, the Margins, Guernica, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, the Paris Review Daily, New England Review, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for Feast, published by Alice James Books in March 2023. Their forthcoming collection Reverse Requiem is slated for publication in April 2026 (Alice James Books). In 2019, Ina founded a poetry reading series called Indigena Collective, a platform that aims to center marginalized creatives in the NC community and beyond.