Nellie Bellows is a recent MFA graduate of Vermont College, and has poems published in the 2005 Grolier Poetry Prize. She is the assistant poetry editor for Fringe Magazine, and currently works and writes in North Carolina. In “To Satisfy This Demand for Salt,” the title, italicized lines, and some salty facts were found in Neptune’s Gift: A History of Common Salt, by Robert P. Multhauf. To Satisfy This Demand for Salt There Is First of All the Sea Nellie Bellows Everyone is salted with fire. The flames of salt burning blue, the color of driftwood fires. Everyone walking along the beach at night has hair whipped by wind into the mouth: salt, a sticky sweetness, the same film covering arms and legs, drying white-rough. Along the shore where waves pull back, algae glows green and alien, phosphorescent. If bread is the staff of life, salt is the spirit. It sings in the mouth. We followed the animals to its source because, becoming agricultural, we needed more of it. Small grains like the lick of tears. Salt seals the deal; there is pain in binding, in salting wounds for preservation. It is now known that salt exists almost everywhere on earth—sea salt, brine salt, rock salt. And even after this knowledge, we have salaries and go to war. In the parable of the mustard seed, the smallest seed grows into a magnificent tree and becomes a hotel for lodging fowl. It spices the world. A tree of salt is a tree of cures, also a tree of necessary greed; its leaves are like crystals catching the light, disappearing in the rain, a soluble currency. As a child I poured salt from the shaker into my palm and licked. The sweaty hand smelling like dirt, things of the earth. The one day it snows in North Carolina, less than an inch, the roads are overly salted. The asphalt white where it was black, and the tires of trucks are white-powdered-salt-white silent. I catch my cat eating from the salt bowl. Animals need salt, although scientific studies vary in given quantity per species. One source says 10.3 kilograms for milk cows. Deeper within the earth lie terrestrial salt deposits, which have formed through the time span recognized by geologists, from the earliest or Precambrian era (over five hundred million years ago). The salt mines rise around a camera crew filming a TV cooking show—walls shimmering like catacombs for giant cattle and their fat pink tongues.