What the Salt Flats Remember

The salt flats hold the shape of an ancient sea— white crust that cracks like old porcelain, each fracture a small biography of what evaporated before we arrived to name it.

A hawk hangs in the thermal updraft, reading the ground the way we read a face: not for what it says but for what it cannot bring itself to say anymore.

My grandfather kept a jar of river water from the town his family left. He never opened it. The water turned the color of weak tea, then darker, a whole country going to sediment.

Some grief is geological— it moves in strata, in the slow press of weight against weight, until what was fluid becomes the hardest thing you own.

Out here the light has nowhere else to be. It lies across the flats like a confession, sparing nothing, forgetting nothing, patient as the mineral residue of rain.