Salt Flat at Dusk

The white plain holds the sky like a bowl holds water, trembling at the edges where heat has eaten the mountains down to rumors.

A single tire track crosses everything— proof that someone came here once and chose, for reasons unnamed, to leave.

The sun descends without ceremony, turning the salt to copper, then to rust, then to the color of old photographs no one remembers taking.

There is a silence here that has weight, that presses against the chest the way deep water does. You breathe it in and feel less certain of the border between yourself and the open.