Salt Flats at Dusk

The horizon dissolves here, white into white, and you cannot tell where the ground ends or the sky begins its slow erasure.

A single tire track cuts east, pressed into the crust like a sentence that stops mid-thought, the speaker gone.

The sun at this hour is not fire but something older — amber seeping through cheesecloth, diffuse and merciful, laying shadows thin as paper.

You breathe the brine and minerals. You think: I have been carrying things that weigh less than this air, but I carried them like stones.

The light goes. The flats hold the last of it longer than anywhere else — flat surfaces remembering warmth, the way an open hand stays warm after it lets go.