Salt Flats at Low Water

The lake pulls back each summer like a breath held too long, leaving its mineral ghost behind— white and absolute as argument.

You walk out there and the sky doubles beneath your feet, and you don't know which direction is falling anymore.

A crow crosses the mirror. Its shadow crosses the mirror. Two crows, heading opposite directions, meet only once.

Out at the center, where the heat bends the horizon into something you could almost call a city, the silence has a flavor: copper, chalk.

You stay until the light goes pink, then the color of a bruise. The water that was never there holds you perfectly still.