What the Salt Flat Keeps

At the edge of the playa, where the crust holds the shape of old water, I set down everything I carried.

The mountains on the far rim are the same blue as forgetting— not lost, exactly, but loosened, the way a name loosens before sleep.

Here the sky does not arch, it presses. The horizon is a seam, and the white stretches toward it without apology, without a single tree to interrupt the fact of distance.

By noon my shadow is a rumor beneath me. A hawk circles somewhere above the heat shimmer, indifferent as a thought I keep having but cannot finish.

What the salt flat keeps: the shapes of absence, the ghost-geometry of rain, a season's worth of silence pressed so flat it becomes a kind of light.