Salt Flats at Dusk

The last light pours itself across the basin like something running out of time to say— copper and rust, then the pale forgetting of a sky too wide to hold its color.

You walk out onto the crust of it. Each step a small collapse, a give, the earth unsure of what you weigh or whether you deserve to pass.

The mountains are just suggestions now, smudged at their edges, half-erased. A hawk pivots once and disappears into the part of the horizon no one names.

Here is where the silence has a texture. You run your tongue across the air and taste what the sea left behind when it gave up— mineral, old, the grief of ancient water.