Salt

Crystal memory of ancient seas— each grain a small extinction, the ocean compressed into white. I taste the bitterness of time on my tongue, in the cracks of my hands, the earth's wound seasoning the wound. In the mine shaft's dark cathedral, dissolved into nothing, then reformed in geometric perfection— the only beautiful trap. It burns where the skin breaks. It preserves what would otherwise rot. It is both the wound and the salt in the wound, the very principle of what remains when the rest dissolves.