Salt Cathedral

Somewhere beneath the mountain a cathedral carved itself from salt, its columns worn smooth by the tongues of animals that came before roads.

The walls hold light the way a jar holds the last pulse of a firefly— reluctant, amber, nearly gone. Each crystal is a sentence no one finished.

I have walked rooms like this, hollowed by what was taken, the ceiling so high my breathing returned to me as someone else's voice.

They say the miners sang down here, that sound does not decay in salt but thickens, grows a rind. If you press your ear to the wall you can hear a hymn still trying to leave.