Salt Lick

The hills behind the farmhouse wore their rust like an heirloom, lichen mapping every compass point no one had thought to name.

Cattle came at dusk to the mineral block, tongues rough as sandstone, grinding the white cube down to a fist, then a tooth, then nothing.

I watched from the porch where the wood had silvered past all staining, each plank a river viewed from above— current lines pressed into grain.

What the animals wanted was simple, elemental as thirst squared: the body calling out for what it lacks in a language older than the mouth.

And the hills kept losing themselves one rain at a time, their red dust salting the creek that carried it, uncomplaining, to the sea.