What the Salt Flat Remembers

The salt flat holds the shape of water long after the water is gone— a white grammar of what was once moving, now crystallized into argument.

You can walk for an hour in any direction and the horizon stays the same distance away, as if the land itself refuses the idea of arrival.

A hawk pivots on a thermal. Below it, nothing casts a shadow worth measuring. The sun makes no exceptions here.

Whatever you buried in the city comes back to you in this silence— not as weight but as sound, something just below the frequency of speech.

By evening the flat turns violet, then rose, then a gray that has no name in any language I was taught. You walk back the way you came. The salt keeps its record.