Desalination Nocturne

The plant hums like a distant choir, pipes sweating salt under sodium lamps, a gull’s shadow skates across the tanks, water learning new names in the dark.

Inside, membranes breathe in slow sheets, thin as onion skin, holding back the mineral ghosts; the sea is sifted, combed, made to forget, its rough syllables softened into glass.

By the intake, a fisherman lights a cigarette, embers blinking like buoys in a private tide; he tastes the wind and says nothing to the waves, as if speech could fracture the quiet machinery.

At dawn, trucks leave with a slosh of daylight, streets rinsed clean of the night’s brine; a city lifts a cup and drinks the horizon, not knowing how much darkness it has swallowed.